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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Terence Davies

The one misfire:
60 The Neon Bible (1996)

The esteemed English filmmaker has an average Metascore of 77 for his eight features to date. His lowest-scoring film (which missed green territory by a single point) is an adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces author John Kennedy Toole's debut novel, set in the American South during the 1940s. The novel itself is short, and many reviewers found the resulting film too slight, though it's not without a few praiseworthy moments.

Everything else:
83 Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
85 The Long Day Closes (1992)
78 The House of Mirth (2000)
81 Of Time and the City (2008)
82 The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
72 Sunset Song (2015)
77 A Quiet Passion (2016)

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