Antoine Fuqua

Antoine Fuqua came up through music videos, shooting for Toni Braxton, Coolio, Stevie Wonder and Prince, and the training shows: he builds sequences around a single strong image and cuts on rhythm rather than on plot. His first feature was The Replacement Killers in 1998, produced by John Woo and starring Chow Yun Fat, which is about as literal a statement of influence as a debut can make.

Training Day in 2001 is still the high point and the film everything since gets measured against. It works because Fuqua shoots Los Angeles as a place with rules the audience learns at the same speed the rookie does, and because he had the nerve to let Denzel Washington be genuinely charming for an hour before asking anything else of him. Washington won the Academy Award for Best Actor, Fuqua took the Black Reel Award for Outstanding Director, and the pair have now made five films together.

The pattern since is a director who works constantly and unevenly, and who is much better in a confined space than with spectacle. Brooklyn's Finest, Southpaw and The Guilty, which is essentially one man and a telephone, are tighter and more interesting than Olympus Has Fallen or the King Arthur film. The Equalizer series is the commercial engine, three films of a very calm man dismantling organised crime on a stopwatch, and it works precisely because Fuqua keeps the geography of a room legible. Emancipation and the Michael Jackson picture Michael are the recent attempts at something with more scale.