Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes came to film from the theatre, and from a high perch in it. He read English at Cambridge, began directing plays there, and ran the Donmar Warehouse while still young, building a reputation for dark reinventions of stage musicals. His first film, American Beauty, arrived in 1999 and took the Academy Award, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for direction.

What he brought from the stage is composition and control. He blocks a scene like a man who has thought hard about sightlines, and he hires cinematographers who can hold an image: Road to Perdition is a gangster film assembled out of rain and silence, and 1917 reduces a war to two men crossing open ground, stitched to look like a single continuous take. The criticism that has trailed him for twenty-five years is that the control tips into airlessness, and it is fair about Revolutionary Road and Empire of Light, films that admire their own good taste.

Then there is Bond. Skyfall in 2012 is the best-looking entry in the series and the first to make the character's age its subject, and it is probably the most purely enjoyable thing Mendes has done. Spectre, three years later, is what happens when the same team tries to build a mythology instead of a story. He is now making four Beatles films, one per member, which is either the most ambitious project of his career or the logical destination for a director who has always preferred a formal constraint to an open field.