Need hope for the upcoming year? Writing up this feature always gives me that, as I look forward to the movies these first-time directors might have in store. Hollywood’s hiring of women and people of color to direct films appears to have stalled out this year, so I invite them to look at this list. As always, this list is limited to fiction filmmakers. I also typically hail the directors who made a great leap in their second features, so ribbons go to Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (Heretic), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain), Michael Gracey (Better Man), Rich Peppiatt (Kneecap), RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys), Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), Daniel Yoon (East Bay), and Gints Zilbalodis (Flow).
Zia Anger
Her debut feature is fittingly called My First Film. The music video director previously worked on a feature called Always All Ways Anne Marie, which (as her fictional ego points out) is now listed as “abandoned” on Internet Movie Database. Her scarring experience working on that project turned into this very funny and even more meta exercise about millennial angst and navigating the pitfalls of crowdfunding, having a narcissistic addict as your lead actor, and thinking every idea you have is brilliant.
Joanna Arnow
The title of her comedy is eye-catching: The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. More eye-catching was the way this 39-year-old stitched a bunch of scenes (many of which last less than one minute and feature one or two lines of dialogue) together into this cringe-worthy (in the best sense) movie about a woman portrayed by Arnow herself who becomes a sub in a demeaning BDSM relationship as a reaction to the world raining crap down upon her.
Mike Cheslik
I saw the trailer for Hundreds of Beavers and thought, “If the movie is half as insane as the trailer looks, it’s going on my top 10 list.” Well, it turned out to be more than half. I wasn’t looking for a filmmaker to land halfway between Mack Sennett and Guy Maddin, but his madcap and mostly silent comedy proved to be a worthy heir to the great comedy filmmakers of the 1920s. Seeing a frontiersman in a coonskin cap tackle a guy in a beaver suit and try to eat him just cheers me up.
India Donaldson
Even though she’s the daughter of Hollywood director Roger Donaldson, this 41-year-old got a late start behind the camera, even working a job in textiles before directing Good One, a coming-of-age story inspired by the experience of quarantining with her teenage half-siblings during the Covid pandemic. The story of a high-school girl who goes on a hiking trip in the Catskills with her dad and his newly divorced best friend was exquisitely calibrated and all too telling about
Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping
Since I reviewed their feature debut Femme, someone placed their short film by the same name on YouTube. This filmmaking team managed to expand their short into a whole other complex animal that takes in the small details of a drag queen’s relationship with the man who gay-bashed him without sacrificing the bruising power of his quest for revenge. Neither cozy nor depicting gay life as hopelessly tragic, this gay neo-noir exercise was something new on the LGBT cinema scene.
Theda Hammel
Another movie about people in lockdown during the Covid pandemic? Spare me. Yet her Stress Positions distinguished itself by actually being funny and also being told from her point of view as a transgender woman. The main character was a gay cisgender man who seems like the last person you would want to quarantine with: He’s whiny, paranoid, sanctimonious, micromanaging, casually racist and transphobic, and a hater of other people’s success. He and the New York artistes around him (one played by Hammel herself) came to horrible and hilarious life here.
Titus Kaphar
The 49-year-old artist actually painted the striking works created by the main character of his Exhibiting Forgiveness. Kaphar had a full career before going into filmmaking, including a cover of Time magazine and a collaboration with the mentally disturbed man who vandalized one of his paintings. It’s not the easiest thing to transition from museum art to cinema, but as my inclusion of him in my movie dialogue post shows, he also has a talent for words and directing actors that you can see.
Zoë Kravitz
Oh, that plot reveal! The 36-year-old Hollywood actress would have done well merely conceiving and shaping the diabolical plot of Blink Twice, but she also gave her horror-thriller sharp scene transitions and a luxurious atmosphere without sacrificing the overweening feeling of something being wrong behind all the bro swag. If not for the miscasting of Kravitz’ boyfriend, this would have ranked even higher on my top 10 list.
Dev Patel
The 34-year-old British leading man tried to hire Neill Blomkamp (who worked with him on Chappie) to direct Monkey Man, but the South African director suggested that he go behind the camera himself. The result was an electrifying fusion of Indian and Western action cinema that dared to show the seamier side of Mumbai while delivering some of the best fight sequences in this year’s action movies.
Daina O. Pusić
The Croatian director made a number of short films before her debut feature Tuesday. Simply the act of imagining Death as a disease-ridden scarlet macaw with a deep voice was enough to raise the movie above the herd, but so too was this young filmmaker’s willingness to engage with the mysterious nature of death. She’s the second person from her country to make this list since the pandemic — might Croatia be the next hot filmmaking scene?
Monica Sorelle
The University of Central Florida graduate grew up in Miami as a child of Haitian parents, which is likely why her Mountains feels so lived-in. Her look at gentrification and the way it’s pushing out people like her parents was complex and nuanced, and the perspective of a family speaking Creole (as well as Spanish and English, because they’re in South Florida) gave it a cultural base that we haven’t had from other movies on the subject.
Malcolm Washington
Denzel Washington’s 34-year-old son directed his brother John David Washington to his best performance to date in The Piano Lesson and managed to be the latest director to make one of August Wilson’s stage plays into vibrant cinema. Especially good were the ensemble acting by the cast and the supernatural touches that can be hokey in the wrong hands. Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle appears to be the property of the Washington family, and I don’t have any objections yet.
Jason Yu
This 35-year-old Korean is a protégé of Bong Joon-ho, and his horror-comedy Sleep, while not exactly worthy of the master himself, did show a good deal of flair for a hybrid genre whose mix is hard to manage. The story of a pregnant housewife who tries to prevent her famous-actor husband from sleepwalking was an uncanny and unique piece of phantasmagoria. You won’t soon forget the husband suddenly saying the words, “Someone’s inside” in the midst of his slumber.
Honorable mention: Pamela Adlon, Babes; Annie Baker, Janet Planet; Cameron and Colin Cairnes, Late Night With the Devil; Sam and Max Eggers, The Front Room; Greg Jardin, It’s What’s Inside; Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls; Ariane Louis-Seize, Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person; Molly Manning Walker, How to Have Sex; Josh Margolin, Thelma; Moritz Mohr, Boy Kills World; Robert Morgan, Stopmotion; Rachel Morrison, The Fire Inside; Chris Nash, In a Violent Nature; Jérémie Périn, Mars Express; Arkasha Stevenson, The First Omen; Sean Wang, Dìdi; Zelda Williams, Lisa Frankenstein.
