Other great directors?

I'm not as schooled in the old-timey directors as I should be, but I know Orson Welles, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Alfred Hitchcock were among the best. There are surely some really great ones that I need to learn about by taking more film classes (I took one to satisfy an elective in college but the teacher was totally wrong in his views and I got more frustrated than anything), and also paying attention to who directed what the next time I go through a long 'fest' of oldies again.

When I was younger the most I took from them outside of the movies themselves (which is after all the primary and most important meme or idea), were the actors, whom I could soon remember from other films and begin to build networks in my brain about whom I approved of, who I really liked, and who was distasteful. This would often guide what I would watch subsequently (or my mom, an "old movie" buff herself, would do the honors). But I didn't quite understand the powerful force that the director represented in the making of a film, and especially in how it turned out (along with the long-suffering editors, who do as much as anyone to shape a movie into a hit or a dud), so I rarely ever paid attention.

As far as directors who have worked in my era (1970s to the present) and continue to work, some of my favorites, besides Lynch who I already mentioned earlier, are Lars von Trier, Wim Wenders, Sofia Coppola, Christopher Nolan, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, Michel Gondry, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and at times, Stephen Spielberg and Woody Allen, though neither of them are what they once were, having strayed outside their comfort zones in the 90s and 2000s a bit too often with too little to show for it.

And I'm surely forgetting as many or more as I'm listing. Feel free to help me out with your suggestions (old and new). I may reply to your reply with my own thoughts, but I would never belittle you for your taste, unless you come at me with Uwe Boll or Michael Bay. Then you're simply asking for it.

I admit my list is off the top of my head and also very light on foreign-language directors. As I said, I'm very willing to be educated on all the great directors from Spain, France, Hong-Kong, Italy, Sweden, Japan, Iran, Mexico, Holland, and everywhere else in the world... I'm still learning as I go. I hope you are too.

Directors I didn't forget, but who are not mentioned because I don't care for them (or maybe only like a film or two in their body of work and don't consider them "great" in any sense), include:

Tim Burton
Joel & Ethan Coen
Spike Jonze
Peter Jackson
Martin Scorcese
Stephen Soderbergh
Quentin Tarantino
Michael Mann
James Cameron
Sam Raimi
Zack Snyder
Paul Thomas Anderson
Ron Howard
Spike Lee
Brad Bird
John Lasseter
Frank Miller
Brian DePalma
Luc Besson
Mel Gibson

So, I'm not saying the above directors never made any good movies, many of them have made a few quite good movies. But they are not great directors in my opinion, though, were my blog actually read by a sizable audience, I'd surely encounter horribly heated arguments over people like Scorcese. But it's my blog and my opinion. I like a few of his films a lot, a few a little, and many not at all. His style, like Michael Mann's, never seems to change. Anyway, it's my list and no one else's so I can say what I like.

You are free (and encouraged) to have your say in the comments section. I enjoy agreement and disagreement equally. :)