​With her latest film, Typist Artist Pirate King,​ on Netflix, it’s a good time to survey the back-catalogue of one of the UK’s most thrilling film-makers, from a jaw-droppingly personal documentary to a misunderstood neo-noir

The director’s new BFI season championing hidden gems of British film, hot on the heels of his Powell and Pressburger documentary, reveals some of the inspirations of a film-making great and passionate fan

The great Japanese animator, whose 1988 masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is back in cinemas, embraces the universe yet never shies away from life’s grittier elements

From vampire noir to Bin Laden, Point Break to Detroit, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director has never pulled her punches

From The Brood to Crash and new film The Shrouds, the Canadian body horror pioneer has outraged the censors and inspired countless directors

As his dazzling debut, Shallow Grave, gets a 30th anniversary rerelease, here’s to an extraordinary career that ranges from Trainspotting to Slumdog Millionaire and that unforgettable London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony

From gritty banlieue drama Girlhood to period piece Portrait of a Lady on Fire and animation My Life As a Courgette, the French director’s films never fail to connect eloquently with us

As A Nightmare on Elm Street turns 40, here’s to the softly spoken American creator of some of cinema’s most memorable scares, from razor-clawed serial killer Freddy Krueger to the sequel-spawning Scream

From his feature debut, Hunger, to his new documentary, Occupied City, the Oscar-winning director and Turner prize winner’s work has been a long, lively conversation between art and film

From Memento to the Golden Globe-winning Oppenheimer, the head-scrambling British-American director has revelled in using cinema as a time machine – and a conjuring trick

From her striking debut to The Souvenir and new release The Eternal Daughter, the British film-maker circles around loss, memory and rebirth in dramas of piercing intensity

From Distant Voices, Still Lives to Benediction, the lyrical work of the late director was suffused with the ‘ecstasy’ of cinema – and his fraught Liverpool childhood

In the first of a new monthly Observer column on his favourite film-makers, Mark Kermode salutes the elliptical vision of the director of Don’t Look Now, Walkabout, Performance and so much more