The 20 best follow-up movies after winning a Best Director Oscar

The Academy’s inaugural Best Director winner followed up 1927’s “Seventh Heaven” with this stellar silent melodrama about a young woman (Janet Gaynor) forced into prostitution by her destitute circumstances. Borzage was at the height of his cinematic powers at the tail end of the silent era, and while this might not match the towering heights of his previous triumph, it’s still a wondrous achievement.

Frank Capra earned his third Best Director Oscar for his 1938 film adaptation of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s theatrical smash “You Can’t Take It with You,” but he failed to snag the top prize the following year for arguably his finest film, which had the profound misfortune of being released the same year as a cinematic juggernaut called “Gone with the Wind.” Seventy-nine years later, Capra’s classic about an idealistic U.S. Senator taking on corruption in Washington D.C. has far greater resonance than David O. Selznick’s Southern soap opera.

William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” encore is a first-rate adaptation of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s sturdily constructed stage play that, in hindsight, should’ve earned him his third Best Director Oscar. (The trophy went to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for his “All About Eve” warm-up “A Letter to Three Wives.”) Wyler’s compositional mastery (enhanced by Leo Torver’s stunning black-and-white cinematography) is on full display, and he draws out sensational performances from Olivia de Havilland (who won Best Actress), Montgomery Clift and Robert Richardson.

Billy Wilder’s rambunctiously funny follow-up to “The Apartment” famously drove James Cagney into retirement — and aside from a supporting performance 20 years later in Miloš Forman’s “Ragtime,” he stuck to it. Cast as a Coca-Cola executive attempting to introduce the sugary Western indulgence to communist Eastern Europe, Cagney goes full throttle at Wilder’s up-tempo behest. It’s a manic comedic treasure.

Fred Zinnemann returned from a seven-year layoff after winning Best Director for 1966's “A Man for All Seasons” with this cracking adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller about the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle. It’s a refreshingly apolitical change of pace from the weighty prestige films on which Zinnemann made his name. It’s a shame he didn’t indulge his crowd-pleasing instincts more often.

William Friedkin won a well-deserved Best Director Oscar in 1971 for his New Hollywood reinvention of the cop film with “The French Connection” and probably should’ve taken home his second Oscar for the equally iconic “The Exorcist.” George Roy Hill did fine caper comedy work on “The Sting,” but Friedkin’s devilish masterpiece is still traumatizing new viewers 45 years later. 

Bob Fosse’s deep-tissue examination of the convention-shattering firebrand Lenny Bruce doesn’t pack the musical gut-punch of the Weimar Republic-set “Cabaret” (which earned him a surprise Best Director Oscar in 1973 over Francis Ford Coppola for “The Godfather”), but it’s an essential portrait of a self-destructive artist whose work ushered in a new, profane era of stand-up comedy. Fosse only directed five films, and they’re all varying degrees of magnificent.

After winning Best Director for “The Godfather Part II” in 1974 Francis Ford Coppola hubristically took on the Vietnam War via Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and emerged with a madman’s masterpiece that’s considered by many reputable critics and filmmakers to be one of the greatest films ever made. It was the end of a phenomenal four-film run that included both “The Godfather” films and the paranoid suspense classic “The Conversation.”

James L. Brooks’ 1987 dramedy about television newsroom politics (professional and sexual) is a far greater achievement than 1983 Oscar-winner “Terms of Endearment,” but Academy members were all about Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” that year. It’s too bad because this is Brooks’ pièce de résistance that hilariously and tragically captures the moment television journalism collapsed in a ratings-obsessed heap.

Miloš Forman’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” had the grave misfortune of arriving a year after Stephen Frears’ Oscar-winning rendition. It was the Czech filmmaker’s first movie after winning the top directing prize for “Amadeus,” and it’s a meatier, more dramatically satisfying take on the material, thanks in large part to Annette Bening’s powerfully erotic portrayal of the scheming widow Marteuil.

The concluding chapter of Barry Levinson’s Baltimore trilogy was a surprising awards whiff in 1990. While Academy voters swooned for the director’s for-hire management of 1988’s “Rain Man,” they couldn’t quite connect with the melancholy tone of Levinson’s episodic memory piece. Bolstered by excellent performances from Armin Mueller-Stahl and Aidan Quinn, and a sensational Randy Newman score, “Avalon” might be Levinson’s finest film.

Warren Beatty’s follow-up to his Best Director Oscar for “Reds” is a four-color visual feast that presages his long-delayed segue from bachelorhood to married man and father. Working again with the brilliant cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Beatty stages a vibrant recreation of the Chester Gould comic strip he adored as a child. It’s a strangely, stirringly personal film that features Madonna’s finest performance outside of “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

This John Lee Hancock-scripted road movie about a young boy (T.J. Lowther) kidnapped by a violent criminal (Kevin Costner) might’ve made some Oscar noise had it not been Clint Eastwood’s follow-up to his revisionist western classic “Unforgiven.” Twenty-five years later, it’s still Eastwood’s most underrated movie as a director and one of his very best overall.

Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” became the third film in Academy Awards history to sweep the top five Oscar categories (Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay). His follow-up, “Philadelphia,” was never going to match that level of prestige (not in the year of “Schindler’s List”), but this courtroom drama about a lawyer with AIDS (Tom Hanks) taking on the firm that wrongfully fired him is issue-driven filmmaking done right and with the utmost compassion.

“Forrest Gump” is Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar triumph and cultural cross to bear, a coup of (then) state-of-the-art craftsmanship and an empty-headed, high-calorie piece of mainstream myth-making. He redeemed himself in 1997 with this beautiful adaptation of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s novel about humankind making first contact with what is believed to be extraterrestrial life. Zemeckis deftly balances questions of science and faith without pandering to or insulting either side.

“The English Patient” remains a mystifyingly divisive Oscar winner, but reasonable people can agree that Anthony Minghella’s follow-up is a stone-cold noir masterpiece. Based on the first installment in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley series, the late filmmaker’s post-Oscar victory lap is a delectably nasty piece of work featuring career-best performances from Matt Damon and Jude Law. Philip Seymour Hoffman pours on the rich-boy sleaze as the disgusting Freddie Miles. “How’s the peeping, Tommy?”

Steven Spielberg encored his Best Director Oscar for “Saving Private Ryan” by taking on his friend Stanley Kubrick’s long-anticipated science fiction project about an android boy who misses the mommy he never really had. This is a crushingly sad movie, and Spielberg’s first fully considered tangle with mortality. It’s “Pinocchio” from the perspective of a popular storyteller who’s turned his back on the escapist entertainment that made his career. A decade after “Hook,” Spielberg finally left Neverland.

Ang Lee followed up his “Brokeback Mountain” Oscar with this lavishly produced erotic thriller set in World War II-era Hong Kong and China starring Tony Leung and Tang Wei. The film earned an NC-17 rating, which killed its commercial prospects in the United States, and it’s easily Lee’s least discussed film as a result. This needs to change because it’s every bit as brilliant as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the also criminally underappreciated “Ride with the Devil.”

“I’m not here representing Hardbodies.” After winning their first directing Oscars for “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen fled the bleakness of West Texas for the imbecility of Washington D.C. with this low-stakes espionage thriller starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand. It’s a self-inflicted, wholly unavoidable tragedy that plays like a documentary in today’s political environment.

Kathryn Bigelow is still the only woman to ever win a Best Director Oscar, and she should probably have two trophies given the high quality of this political thriller built around the United States’ hunt for and eventual assassination of Osama bin Laden. It remains a profoundly misunderstood film. It depicts the use of torture but at no point suggests that these “enhanced interrogation” techniques aided in the prosecution of the country’s War on Terror. 

Damien Chazelle veered from the musicality of “Whiplash” and “La La Land” to a surprisingly discordant account of Neil Armstrong’s moonshot via Apollo 11. It’s intensely atmospheric à la “Whiplash,” but arrestingly technical in its approach to what has long been viewed as a defining American achievement. Reaching the moon was our cosmic manifest destiny, and it required the stupid courage of three astronauts and a lot of very precise math. As Armstrong, Gosling is the taciturn flipside to the cowboys of “The Right Stuff.” He’s devoid of charm to the point of being barely human. He is an ordinary man with an extraordinary assignment. Chazelle’s film demystifies the majesty of space exploration to a fault, but maybe he’s got a point: on a PR level, we’re more concerned with planting flags on spheres than understanding the vastness of all that galactic expanse.