Third in my ongoing Great Directors series is Wes Anderson, best known for Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson has a very unique and discernible feel to his movies that gives him something of a significant cult following, but his movies are of a high enough caliber to be easily appreciable by anyone tempted to view one.

The second entry in my Great Directors series profiles David Fincher, director of Se7en and Fight Club, among others.  David Fincher’s directorial style seems to always incorporate novel approaches to film-making. When a film’s plot requires a gritty, realistic, but depressing feeling to it Fincher is able to deliver all of that with his directorial skill, as he had to do in making Se7en.   He is similar to Jean-Pierre Jeunet in his command of the visual elements and editing of a film to achieve his goals, but Fincher’s movies are far different than Jeunet’s.

Likely based upon The Magnificent Ambersons, The Royal Tenenbaums follows the attempts Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), the estranged patriarch of the family, to become closer to his family of three child-prodigies, their children, and his ex-wife Etheline Tenenbaum (Angelica Huston).

In my opinion Se7en is easily one of the forty best movies ever made.  It is cast with fantastic actors like Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Morgan Freeman, and Brad Pitt, each portraying their well-developed characters in a manner that should have put them all into consideration for major awards.  The visual effects are haunting and make for a dark look at an American city through the eyes of police detectives working to solve gruesome serial killings themed around the seven deadly sins.