I guess in terms of impression, I'll never forget the first time I saw Ozu, Renoir, Bergman, Mizoguchi, Vigo or Tarkovsky, but more importantly, it was directors like Rohmer, Truffaut or Shohei Imamura that filled out my filmgoing experience. Most recently I've been impressed by Ang Lee's early stuff, Pedro Almodóvar, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Claude Sautet, Hayao Miyazaki, Claude Chabrol and Beat Takeshi Kitano. All of these directors have different visions of humanity, but their films approximate real life and improve upon it, so that humanism becomes an ideal worthy of the cinema, and that type of romanticism is why I love the cinema.  