5 - M. Night Shyamalan

4 - George Lucas

3 - Kevin Smith

2 - Oliver Stone

1 - Brian DePalma

We received some unusual selections and a lot you'd expect. Tim Burton, David Fincher, Woody Allen, Michael Bay, Spike Lee, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Sidney Lumet, Quentin Tarantino, Blake Edwards, Joel Schumacher, Guy Ritchie, Todd Solondz, Robert Altman, Eli Roth, George Clooney, Rob Reiner, and Michael Moore all received votes.

For that matter, so did Doug Liman, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, Orson Welles (oh, please...), Francis Ford Coppolla, Ron Howard, John Carpenter, Rob Zombie, Ang Lee, Christopher Nolan, and Peter Jackson.

We like our five, although the measure of what's overrated is certainly in doubt.

A case could be made that Night Shyamalan is not overrated because people no longer rate him very highly. I would dispute that and say that a lot of moviegoers if not cinephiles still think the guy makes above average movies, even though we're six years removed from him holding that distinction. Strange, isn't it, that his career has gotten worse with each new movie?

George Lucas belongs on this list for one good reason: He's directed six movies. Half of them are good while the other half are unoriginal and almost laughable. On the plus side: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. The negatives: The second Star Wars trilogy, which forever unmasked him as a guy with great ideas but terrible technique.

Kevin Smith received more votes than any other director for this list, and he's certainly one of my personal picks. He's also clearly loved or hated. I just don't get the apologists who have had to clean up after Smith's last few movies. Clerks was very good and a bit revolutionary. Chasing Amy was solid, although not one you'd want part of your legacy to hang on. You could vote for Dogma, although I personally felt it was overpopulated and not terribly funny. Beyond those, you don't have much to work with. And Dogma was nine years ago.

The constant revisiting of Jay and Silent Bob is boring, Clerks II couldn't recapture that moment in time, Jersey Girl is a below-average Ben Affleck movie...and that's saying something. He writes solid dialogue, but Smith struggles with overall storylines and lately, even his dialogue hasn't been there to cover up for his very unspectacular filmmaking.

The top two have made some excellent films, but the majority of their movies are incredibly narcissistic, which is one reason you don't see a Spielberg or a Tim Burton on this list. Their central focus is still to engage and entertain an audience. Oliver Stone forgot that lesson over a decade ago and Brian De Palma has been MIA for 20 years.

Stone's most breathtaking moment is JFK, but how the man who made that film couldn't handle the mass confusion of Natural Born Killers (there's a point to it, right?), got lost in Colin Farrell's reflection in Alexander and somewhere in between decided U-Turn was a good idea is beyond me. Like most of the filmmakers on this list, the good stuff is earlier in his career. World Trade Center wasn't bad - but it's certainly second-tier filmmaking for a guy with Stone's abilities - and we'll see what W. holds

In Stone's mind, though, it seems his movies became more about who was making them than why they were being made.

Brian De Palma was never all that good, frankly, which is why he tops the list. I mean, he's never made a movie as good as JFK. Some would argue Scarface is a masterpiece, but I give credit to - here's a coincidence - Oliver Stone's script over anything in the orgiastic direction of De Palma. And it's significantly overrated, too, by the way. Still, that's his career highlight, and Carrie and Blow Out before it are pretty good, as are The Untouchables and Carlito's Way after it. None of them are classics, but they're better than the rest of his stuff.

So five movies since 1977 have been good to very good.  Look at the number of bad movies on the other side of the scale. Without naming them, I count 11 bad to very bad movies in that same span. Redacted and Black Dahlia, his most recent flicks, are among the very worst films of this decade. And yet, people still let him make movies. Unbelievable.