Julia Hart – “Miss Stevens”
It’s a film so modest that few realized it even existed —it sadly made just a few thousand dollars on release— but Julia Hart’s debut feature “Miss Stevens” is a film that absolutely makes a virtue of being modest. Hart started as a screenwriter, whose feminist Western “The Keeping Room” was a favorite of ours a year or two back. “Miss Stevens,” about a young teacher who agrees to take a few of her students on a road trip to a drama competition, was written for Ellen Page to make her directorial debut with and with Anna Faris to star, but Hart (who’s married to “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz, who also produced and co-wrote this film) eventually took it back, and cast another college-mate, Lily Rabe of “American Horror Story,” in the lead role. It’s an intimate, interior and highly intelligent film that feels drawn from life rather than fiction, and it’s made us fans and followers of Hart for life.
Anna Rose Holmer – “The Fits”
Telling the story of a dance team struck with a contagion of epileptic fits, “The Fits” is easily one of the most striking debut films of the year, rocketing director Anna Rose Holmer to the top of to-watch lists. The NYU grad began as a camera assistant on “Twilight” and a grip on Lena Dunham’s breakthrough “Tiny Furniture,” before working with “Girls” DP Jody Lee Lipes (and producing his excellent documentary “Ballet 422”). She helmed feature length documentary “Twelve Way To Sunday” before “The Fits” was accepted by the Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema fund. The film premiered there this year, but really got a head of steam at Sundance, where our review said it “works like magic” and that it had a “unique shine.” Released earlier in the summer, it became one of the buzzier arthouse indies of the year and bodes for a very, very bright future for Holmer.
Barry Jenkins – “Moonlight”
Not to be all hipster about it, but if we’d been doing this list eight years ago, Jenkins would have been on it — his 2008 debut “Medicine For Melancholy,” a gorgeous, gentrification-themed San Francisco twist on “Before Sunrise,” was a favorite of ours at the time. But given how little seen it was, and what a phenomenon “Moonlight” has become, it was a no-brainer to include him this time —Jenkins has gone from being known by very few to one of the most in-demand directors around and a likely Oscar nominee. His utterly beautiful, deeply felt coming-of-age tale tracking young Chiron and his gradual embrace of his sexual identity in Miami, based on a play by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, is easily one of the best movies of the year, a perfectly achieved combination of raw emotion and extraordinary performances. He’s surely got all kinds of offers on his plate, but next up looks to be a TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.”
Kirsten Johnson – “Cameraperson”
For over a decade, Johnson has been one of the top cinematographers in the documentary sphere, with credits including modern classics like “This Film Is Not Rated,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Invisible War,” and “Citizenfour” (the latter of which she also co-produced). But her second feature as director (after 2004’s “Deadline”) is one of the more striking non-fiction films we’ve seen in a long time, a ‘visual memoir’ that our Katie Walsh called at Sundance “a rumination, a treatise, a theory of documentary filmmaking —a manifesto of sorts that asserts the importance of the camera as a person.” Made up of outtakes from the films she’s worked on organized as a collage, focusing on people interacting with the camera or Johnson herself, it turns out to be “an emotional and heartfelt film that tells us who Johnson is as a person and as an artist,” and proves to be a “stunning achievement in documentary form.” It’s one of the absolute must-see films of the year, and while she looks to have returned to cinematography (she filmed Laura Poitras’s ‘Risk”), we dearly hope she’ll direct again very soon.
Rosemary Myers – “Girl Asleep”
Australasian filmmakers seem to have a particular facility for the coming-of-age movie —Peter Weir, Jane Campion, Taika Waititi and John Duggan each made their name in the genre. Add to their ranks Meyers, whose charming debut “Girl Asleep” is a hidden gem this year. The first feature from a helmer known as one of Australia’s top theatre directors, it’s the 70s-set tale of Greta (Bethan Whitmore in a striking breakthrough turn), who gets an opportunity to fit in at her new school when her parents throw her a fifteenth birthday party. Visually striking, it’s undoubtedly a bit reminiscent, maybe a bit too much so, of Wes Anderson in places, but goes to stranger and very different places as it goes on in a pleasing and very fresh way, and suggests that Myers is a new director with a rare visual eye, ambition and sense of humor.