Anthony Mann is also a favourite of mine. I love how he mines the vein of nastiness that lurks within Jimmy Stewart. (My favourite moment in It's a Wonderful Life is where Jimmy loses it and turns on friends and family.) And Ford's The Searchers is what turned me around on Westerns. (As a kid I was never fond of the genre. I was friends with too many kids from the local Ojibway reserve for the Cowboys & Indians thing to work for me.)

Have you seen any of Budd Boetticher's westerns? He made a number of films in the '50s with Randolph Scott and they are a revelation. Definitely in the same key as Mann.

I'm also a huge Jackie Chan fan. (I've got a framed insert from the Drunken Master 2 soundtrack hanging in our living room.) Also Jet Li and Chow Yun Fat. And Lau Ching Wan. (Lau Ching Wan is a genius!)