Best of 2013: Direction

Best Director

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for working from an emotionally wrecking palette of hardscrabbling working-class dynamics and social realism, achieving bold depth of naturalism and narrative velocity, without The Arbor's oppressiveness.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for conceiving an ill-fated protagonist in a misanthropic hew but veining his hardships with an emotionally tender throughline, subtly invoking dusty, era-specific nostalgia and bruising, ornery cheekiness to do so.

• Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity, for being prodigious in scope, ambition and craft without feeling airless or mechanical in execution or style, achieving a limber braiding of intimacy, empathy and urgency in each of his marvelous sequence constructions.

• Claire Denis for Bastards, for setting up taut, shard-like frames, surfaces and insinuations while balancing sensuous and stoic approaches to confrontational material, and for linking the film's seedy undercurrents and social-political adroitness in ways that serve the story cogently.

• Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave, for seeing trickier, more truthful angles of observation in Solomon's story than I suspect Ridley's otherwise good script does, employing his distinctive strengths of elevated style to evoke a devastating ordeal.

Honorable Mentions begin with Joshua Oppenheimer for The Act of Killing, who immediately grabs our attention with the audacity of his conceit and, barring the one little quibble about insufficient context, keeps the novelty of it sobering, head-spinning and world-crushing; Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, whose gifts with mood and rhythms feel riskier than they usually and more adventurous when applied to its satirical bent; and Andrew Dosunmu for Mother of George, who manages to distribute cultural and familial unease across a bevy of memorable characters and bracing visual schemes.

The rest of the honorable mentions are filled out by (in alphabetical order): Noah Baumbach for Frances Ha; Xavier Dolan for I Killed My Mother; Spike Jonze for Her; Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love; Harmony Korrine for Spring Breakers; Terrence Malick for To the Wonder; Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice; Kim Nguyen for War Witch; Ulrich Seidl for Paradise: Love