I was sitting here contemplating a little post on Widows when I got a text asking who my favorite director is.

Wow.

Impossible for me to answer because there are so many variables.

The question is relevant, however, to my thinking about this film.

After all, if anyone else had made it, I would have liked Widows more.

Steve McQueen is brilliant.

His three feature films before Widows — Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), and 12 Years a Slave (2013) — are distinct aesthetically, searing emotionally, and extraordinary.

Each of these films tackles a difficult and complex issue. Hunger recounts an actual hunger strike in a Northern Irish prison. Shame presents a broken man who hides his sexual dysfunction until he cannot any longer.  And, 12 Years a Slave depicts the horrors of America’s original sin of slavery from an adapted memoir.

In each case, McQueen renders these stories flawlessly on the screen.

In its own way, Widows offers more than the typical heist picture because it also delves into identity issues of race, class, and gender and does so against a backdrop of the rough and tumble (corrupt) world of local politics in a big city.

The film is engaging, the performances are good (when doesn’t Viola Davis rise to the occasion?), and there is much to admire in the movie. For most other directors, this would be enough to satisfy or even exceed my expectations, but I have been trained to expect something more from the magnificent Steve McQueen.

Gosh, now I find my mind returning to that tricky question.

Who is my favorite director?

Even if she had asked about my top 20 directors and to identify a favorite film among their bodies of work, I would have found it difficult to come up with an answer!

I’ve studied Charlie Chaplin, but how could I choose among The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)? I could isolate the oceana roll dance from the first, the ending of the second, and the “Buck – up, never say die. We’ll get along!” intertitle and surrounding shots from the third as high points, I suppose, because each is indelible and poignant.

Or, Alfred Hitchcock offers an interesting case. The misogyny in his films along with the formalism of the style makes them ripe for analysis. He’s not a favorite of mine in the traditional sense, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about his films, have taught a Gender and Hitchcock seminar, and can pretty reliably identify five favorites among his many films: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951),  Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960).

With all the research I’ve done into movies depicting teachers, I can’t even come up with a favorite among the Good Teacher movies. To have a ready answer to this question I get regularly, I used to say Conrack (1974) was my favorite teacher movie until I found it impossible to separate actor Jon Voight’s politics in real life from the progressive teacher he plays on the screen (Pat Conroy in an adaptation of his memoir The Water is Wide)!

I always try to see new films by (in no particular order and not an exhaustive list) by Sophia Coppola, Darren Aronofsky, Jane Campion, Damien Chazelle, Jeff Nichols, Richard Linklater, Lone Sherfig, Nicole Holofcener, Mike Leigh, and I’m certainly keen to see what Greta Gerwig will come up with next after Lady Bird.

I can say that Steve McQueen is among my favorite emerging directors, and 12 Years a Slave is my favorite of his films.

Now I have a question of my questioner. Who is your favorite director?

Not so easy, is it?

(You can consider it a rhetorical question if you like.)