There is something thrilling about seeing a great
debut film – the film by someone you didn’t know before, who hits it out of the
park their first try. Most debut films aren’t great – like most things, it
often takes time for filmmakers to hit their stride. So, not counting docs,
here are the debut films I saw this year – from the not promising, to the top
10.
The following debuts do not fill me with a sense of
anticipation for the director’s careers – but who knows, maybe they’ll figure
it out next time. Den of Thieves
(Christian Gudegast) had some ambition, but was too long and too slack for
an action film. Ghost Stories (Jeremey
Dyson & Andy Nyman) was a standard issue ghost story anthology that
left me yawning. I Feel Pretty (Abby
Kohn & Marc Silverstein) really didn’t have much going for it – and
wastes a good premise and cast. I Kill
Giants (Anders Walter) somehow seems to miss some of the most important
things about its story, and left me scratching my head. Marrowbone (Sergio G. Sanchez) was a bland haunted house horror
movie. Still/Born (Brandon Christensen) was
a bland possession horror movie.
While these debuts don’t have me on the edge of my
seat waiting for what’s next, they weren’t bad either – and show promise: Allure (Carlos & Jason Sanchez) got
a great performance from Evan Rachel Wood, and some style, but doesn’t really
add up too much. Cargo (Yolanada Ramke
& Ben Howling) is a pretty good zombie film – but I think could have
been better. Hotel Artemis (Drew Pearce)
was ambitious, and I would like more mainstream films like it – just a
little better. Like Me (Robert Mockler) really
tried to have its finger on the current social media pulse, and shows promise,
but was also rather scattershot. Mary
Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke) is certainly handsomely mounted, but never
really gets beyond dull history lesson. On
Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke) is all handsomely mounted to be sure, but
feels a little bland, and it doesn’t capture what made Ian McEwan’s novel
special.
None of these were great – but all of them were
good, and could bode well for future careers. Bomb City (Jamie Brooks) is a good punk vs. jocks in Texas, based
on a shocking true story. The Cured
(David Freyne) is a very good zombie movie, with a brilliant premise, which
doesn’t quite stick the landing. First
Match (Olivia Newman) is a fine indie sports film, about a teenage female
wrestler fighting her family legacy.
Midnighters (Julius Ramsay) is an expertly crafted people make stupid
decision thriller.
Finally, the following debuts could have easily
ended up on my top 10 list if the year had been weaker. All About Nina (Eva Vives) is a smart, funny and ultimately hard
hitting comedy/drama with a great performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a
standup comedian. Beast (Michael Pearce)
is a strange adult fairy tale with two wonderful performances. Blame (Quinn Shephard) is a wonderful
debut for its debut director/writer/star about a teenage girl and a high school
teacher – which goes in some unexpected places. Blockers (Kay Cannon) is a very funny, but also very open-minded,
film about three teenage girls determined to lose their virginity, and their
parents who want to stop them. Calibre
(Matt Palmer) is a very tense film about two city dwellers who go hunting –
and get in a lot of trouble. Mid90s
(Jonah Hill) has its share of problems, but reveals Hill to be a natural
filmmaker with great instincts, and I cannot wait to see what he comes up with
next. Oh Lucy! (Atsuko Hiroyanagi) is
a very odd film about a middle aged Japanese woman coming to America looking
for her niece – and her lover, who she is also in love with. 6 Balloons (Marja-Lewis Ryan) is a
fine movie about drug addiction and enabling behavior –with a wonderful
performance by Abbi Jacobson. Summer
1993 (Carla Simon) is a look back at childhood in which everyone tries
their best, but it’s still quite sad. We
the Animals (Jeremiah Zager) is a poetic, impressionistic film in the vein
of early David Gordon Green about a family struggling with domestic abuse, and
growing up gay.
10.
Custody (Xavier Legrand)
Custody is a devastating drama about a custody
battle that starts off as a kind of horror of bureaucracy, and ends with a
sequence as suspenseful as any thriller. A couple is getting divorced, and
while their teenage daughter is old enough to say she doesn’t want to see her
brutish father – the 12-year-old son is forced to. He doesn’t want to – he
knows what kind of man his father is, and he suffers his verbal abuse, and then
forces him to tell him where they are living now. For most of the film, the
tension builds – it is a powder keg ready to explode – and when it finally
does, the result is devastating. When Custody starts, it looks like it could be
a study of benign bureaucracy run amok – but it turns out to be larger than
that. A great debut for Legrand – and a film that I hope finds more of an
audience that it has received so far.
9.
The Guilty (Gustav Moller)
The Guilty is a ruthlessly effective thriller –
taking place entirely inside a call 911 call center, with only one major face
we see – that of a cop sentenced there waiting the outcome of a disciplinary
hearing (a great Jakob Cedergren). When a woman calls saying that she has been
kidnapped by her ex-husband – who is currently driving her somewhere – the cop
takes it upon himself to try and solve the problem – getting way more involved
then he should, all while never leaving the room. The Guilty is a brilliant
example on how you really do not need all that much to make an amazingly
intense film. Moller has a gift for making this one location visually
interesting, and for supplying narrative twists and turns that do not feel
cheap or unearned. I wonder what he can do with more resources next time.
8.
Wildlife (Paul Dano)
Actor Paul Dano made his first film behind the
camera this year, and Wildlife shows the same kind of sensitivity and attention
to detail that Dano always shows an actor. A delicate story about life in 1960s
for a struggling family – they’ve just moved again, the father (Jake
Gyllenhaal) has just lost another job, and has no decided to leave his family
for months to go fight a wildfire. The mother (Carey Mulligan), feeling stifled
by this life, starts doing things that, well, just aren’t very good. All of
this is seen through the eyes of their teenage son (Ed Oxenbould). The
screenplay, by Dano and Zoe Kazan, never judges the characters, or condemns
them for what they do – it looks at them clear eyed. The attention to period
detail is wonderful, and the performances are exquisite, sensitive and subtle –
even in their bigger moments. Adapting a Richard Ford novel isn’t easy – but
this film does it extremely well, especially for a first time director. Here’s
hoping Dano keeps making film behind the camera (and in front).
7.
Blindspotting (Carlos Lopez Estrada)
It can be a little hard to figure out how much
credit Lopez Estrada gets from Blindspotting – a film that is very much about
its writing and performances of the two leads/screenwriters Daveed Diggs and
Rafael Casal, who pair off and do a lot of verbal gymnastics in their portrait
of a gentrifying Oakland, and its effects on them as individuals, and as
friends. But while Diggs and Casal are clearly the stars of the show here,
Lopez Estrada is able to keep everything on track – keep the pacing up and not
let it get lost in all that writing. It’s also a visually fascinating portrait
of Oakland – making plain everything that is being talked about. Yes, I am more
excited to see what the two writers do next – but we shouldn’t overlook the
exciting contribution made by the director – I know I’m looking forward to
whatever he does next.
6.
Revenge (Coralie Fargeat)
Revenge is a gutsy film for debut filmmaker Coralie
Fargeat – who is essentially trying to take back the rape/revenge film, and put
a feminist spin on it – while still making an exciting, bloody as hell genre
picture. She succeeds and then some with Revenge – which has a great central
performance, and is as disturbing as it needs to be in the beginning (there is
no fetishization of the ugliness on display here) – and then gets bloody, and
at times very fun as it comes down the stretch. This is a film that grabs you
from the start, and then just keeps twisting you. A great debut, from an
exciting new voice in horror.
5.
A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)
You have to give Bradley Cooper a lot of credit
here – he really did run the risk of having his first directorial effort be
dismissed as nothing but a great big vanity project – giving himself a plum,
tragic role to show off his skills, and then picking an inexperienced actress
to star opposite him. Not to mention, he picked one of the oldest stories in
the book to do it with. But he gets a lot of credit from him as a director for
really going for – and sticking the landing. His film is intimate in a way that
is hard to pull off – the musical performances are brilliantly photographed,
and he really does an excellent job at fleshing out his own role – making him
more tragic than in previous versions. There are some minor missteps along the
way – but nothing major – and it really is an ambitious film for a first time
filmmaker like Cooper – who deserves all the credit he is getting for it.
4.
Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley)
When you hear a playwright is turning to
filmmaking, you probably think their first film will be a hyper verbal one –
basically a filmed play, rather than a movie. But that was not the case with
Finley, whose first film as a director has a chilly style to it, and makes the
most of sound editing and silence as story telling devices. The film centers on
a pair of teenage girls (Anya-Taylor Joy and Olivia Cooke), who were once
friends, but have drifted apart in recent years. Now, they’re back together – and
perhaps planning a murder. Finley does an excellent job of keeping you off
balance – of providing twists in the plot, that also feel natural. The two lead
performances are great – with Cooke the more outwardly unstable one, but Joy
the truly troubled one – playing off each other brilliantly. Thoroughbreds
didn’t get the attention it deserved when it came out early in the year – but
it should be a film that sticks with you a lot longer than most. It’s a great
debut for Finley – who is as adept at directing as he is at writing.
3.
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)
The strangest, most ambitious and audacious debut
of the year is Boots Riley’s surreal satire of working in a phone bank in
Oakland, in a not so distant dystopian future. The film begins normal enough,
but as our main character (a terrific Lakeith Stanfield, who grounds the entire
movie) slowly sells his soul to move up the corporate ladder, the film spins
wildly (and deliberately) off the rails in its satire of capitalist greed and
excess. The whole cast is terrific and the screenplay is full of witty moments,
lines and asides. But it’s really Riley’s direction – which finds a lot of
innovative ways to shoot things on a low budget, that really is the star here.
There is not a shot wasted here – but also not a shot without something
interesting going on in it. I do think the two other debut films on this list
are better overall than Sorry to Bother You – but I may just be looking forward
to a new Boots Riley film more than the other two.
2.Hereditary
(Ari Aster)
It is not uncommon to be able to read a director’s
influences in their debut film – and that is the case with Aster, whose
Hereditary has elements you can identify from films like Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby or Roeg’s Don’t Look Now among many others. But the great filmmakers know
how to take those influences, and come up with something unique and original.
That is really what Aster is able to do here – he comes up with a unique and
creepy concoction all his own, with tremendously scary set pieces to be sure,
but also a wonderful sense of atmosphere, tension and family dynamics. The film
is perhaps a touch messy – it tries to cram so much in – but that’s common for
first time filmmakers. I cannot wait to see what he comes up with next – as he
has already crafted one of the best horror films of the decade his first time
out.
1.
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
Eighth Grade is a film that gets that painful
awkwardness of being 13 precisely right. It’s a funny film, a touching film and
in one brilliant sequence a scary film – but it’s how standup comedian turned
filmmaker Bo Burnham mixes these elements together so that the co-exist
side-by-side that makes Eighth Grade such a special film. It’s also in finding
Elsie Fisher, who is excellent in the lead role – a girl who wants to be
popular, wants to be liked – wants to be just like everyone else in school, but
is so painfully shy that she will just never quite get there. It’s a sweet
performance and also a tough one – full of minor triumphs and setbacks. This
type of filmmaking I think seems a lot easier than it really is – and Burnham
pulls it off just about perfectly his first time out – making the best debut of
the year.
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