A vocal faction insists that Welles never produced anything worthwhile after his milestone directorial debut, "Citizen Kane." Even those who find a hint of brilliance in "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil" dismiss the last decades of Welles' life as a sad parade of impractical projects an

Anxiety, Enigmatic, Epic, Excessive, Huge, Voluminous, Witty

Jim Jarmusch could be called the father of American Independent Film -- if it didn't seem uncouth to bestow such a grandiose title on a man still so relatively young, and to declare the paternity of such a squirming and bastard art form. Jarmusch moved to New York from his hometown of Akron, Ohio, to

Absurd, Death, Dystopic, Fantastic, Melancholy, Witty

The nebbish persona of Woody Allen's early 1960s stand-up shtick proved to be the springboard that took this most unlikely New York neurotic into a serious career as a leading auteur of international cinema. In his first film, "What's New, Pussycat?" which he wrote and acted in, Allen presented the i

Anxiety, Contemplative, Moody, Neurotic, Parody, Perverse, Urban

Joel and Ethan Coen cut their teeth on relatively low budget, fringe films. The black-humored brothers' deviant reinterpretations of Hollywood formulas laugh in the face of the studio system. Influenced more by cartoons, B-movies, and exploitation flicks than by pretentious prestige productions, the

Absurd, Bombast, Cartoonish, Grotesque, Playful, Smart, Witty