Personally, I was very pleased with Patrice Leconte's "The Girl on the Bridge" and think of the film more as a return to form after a series of uneven films after "Monsieur Hire".  I thought that "Ridicule", "Parfum d'Yvonne" and "The Widow of St. Pierre" were good, at best.

One filmmaker whosw work always impresses me is Aleksandr Sokurov.  I have only seen four of his films - "The Stone", "Oriental Elegy", "Mother and Son" and "Dolce" - but they are all exquisitely photographed, spare and haunting.  Like Krzysztof Kieslowski, Hirokazu Kore-Eda and Abbas Kiarostami, Sokurov also began his career as a documentarian (and still continues to film documentaries), and I think that this innate concern for humanity is revealed through his films.  Like Andrei Tarkovsky, his films are also deeply spiritual, although more secular and "grounded", and in this sense, has a certain immediacy of purpose to it.

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