Premiere Magazine's The Vanguard Film Canon

Transcribed from Premiere Magazine’s October 1998 issue of the most important envelope-pushing films to date. It’s 10 years old now, but most of the included films are timeless, and sadly, still push boundaries. There are two ‘Scarface’s listed. This is not an error; see them both.
Sadly, the list options don’t always include the director’s credit, so, in the interests of not misleading film viewers to bad remakes, as well as providing a list of ‘directors you should know’, let me do so for the uncredited films:
Badlands (Terrence Mallick), Bananas (Woody Allen), Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock), Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks), Bob le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville), Brazil (Terry Gilliam), Breathless (Jean-Luc Goddard), Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Salvador Dali), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola), Crimes & Misdemeanors (Woody Allen), Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg), Dirty Harry (Don Seigel), Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker), Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee), 8 1/2 (Fellini), 400 Blows (Francois Truffault), Halloween (John Carpenter), The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese), Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell), Pink Flamingos (John Waters), Rashomon (Akira Kirosawa), Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino), Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah), Shaft (Gordon Parks).