25 Misfires From Otherwise Great Film Directors

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – April 22, 2018

Last week, we looked at 30 filmmakers who made only one well-reviewed movie over their entire careers. Today, we examine the opposite group: directors who have nearly flawless careers, with only a single misfire (with a Metascore of 60 or lower) standing in the way of a perfect record of all-green scores.

Note that we only looked at directors who have made at least five films since 1980.

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Alfonso Cuarón

The one misfire:
55 Great Expectations (1998)

The Oscar-winning Mexican director stumbled only with his third feature (and second in the English language), an adaptation of the Dickens novel set in contemporary New York that starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke. Some critics praised Cuarón's stylistic flair, but many failed to appreciate the film's modernized take on the source material.

After spending a decade helming genre films, Cuarón will return to smaller-scale filmmaking with Roma, a family drama set in 1970s Mexico City that will stream on Netflix later this year.

Everything else:
61 Sólo Con Tu Pareja (1991)
83 A Little Princess (1995)
88 Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
82 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
84 Children of Men (2006)
96 Gravity (2013)

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