The best director so far has been Sam Mendes. He started his directing career off in 1999 with one of my favorite movies, American Beauty, and backed it up with a wonderful noir film, Road To Perdition. A lot of you guys are saying Tarantino but he's only made one film in the last seven years (two technically but basically one, since he split one movie into two), and though I'm a big kung-fu fan I don't think Tarantino really acheived what he wanted with Kill Bill. It'll be a cult classic for a while though, like more or less anything he does, so more power to him. Anyways, you also can't include Kubrick (though he's my favorite director and probably always will be) since his last movie was in 1999 and didn't really show him on top of his game. I wouldn't count A.I. as one of his movies cause A.I. is not nearly as good as Kubrick would have wanted it to be, I think Spielberg really let it die, in fact he wasn't even completely satisfied yet with Eyes Wide Shut before his death so bleh. 🙁 Another director who has a lot of potential is Zhang Yimou, who's brought us Hero and House of Flying Daggers. He's been around for about 15 years now, making mostly dramas, but now he's really exploding on the scene as a class-A action director and I think very soon he'll be regarded as one of the best of his kind that ever lived. And, well bleh, one more: Spike Jonze. Him and Charlie Kaufman are hitting gold with every stride, and right now they're planning a horror flick due out within a couple years, which I'm eagerly awaiting. 🙂
-Kev