The Best Four Films In a Row By Any Director is....

I saw a tweet today that suggested that the best four-film-run of movies by any director was by Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part 2 (1974), The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979). I immediately took this as a challenge and looked for any director that has put out four consecutive films that could match or surpass Coppola’s output. The short answer is: I couldn’t. Several directors had four great films out of five or six, or had three great ones in a row. (Disclaimer: My criteria for a film being great is that I love it, therefore, of course, this is totally subjective.) For example Andrei Tarkovsky would have been a very close second to Coppola with Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979), but he had Solaris (1979) mixed in there and it is to me his weakest film.

Below I have compiled some runners up to Coppola’s fab four which I have put in order. At the top are four by Michelangelo Antonioni’ which came within a whisker of equaling Coppola’s quartet, followed by four from Stanley Kubrick which was also very close. You will note that there are two foursomes from both Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen. It is interesting to note that I couldn't find four in a row that rated from such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Billy Wilder, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Rainier Werner Fassbinder or my favorite director, Ingmar Bergman.

From Michelangelo Antonioni 1961-1964:
L’Avventura (1961)
La Notte (1961)
L’Eclisse (1962)
Red Desert (1964)

From Stanley Kubrick from 1968-1980:
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
The Shining (1980)

From Hal Ashby from 1970-1975:
The Landlord (1970)
Harold and Maude (1971)
The Last Detail (1973)
Shampoo (1975)

From Charlie Chaplin from 1925-1936:
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Circus (1928)
City Lights (1931)
Modern Times (1936)

From Preston Sturges from 1941-1943:
The Lady Eve (1941)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943)

From Alfred Hitchcock from 1958-1963:
Vertigo (1958)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
The Birds (1963)

From Woody Allen from 1975-1979:
Love and Death (1975)
Annie Hall (1977)
Interiors (1978)
Manhattan (1979)

From Aki Kaurismaki from 2002-2017:
The Man Without a Past (2002)
Lights in the Dusk (2006)
Le Havre (2011)
The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Also from Woody Allen from 1984-1987:
Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Radio Days (1987)

From Federico Fellini from 1955-1963:
Il Bidone (1955)
Nights of Cabiria (1957)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
8 1/2 (1963)

Also from Alfred Hitchcock from 1940-1942:
Rebecca (1940)
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)
Suspicion (1941)

From the Coen Brothers from 1996-2001:
Fargo (1996)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

From Lynne Ramsey from 1999-2017:
Ratcather (1999)
Morvern Caller (2002)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
You Were Never Really Here (2017)