the-best-directorial-debuts-of-2018

While we aim to discuss a wide breadth of films each year, few things give us more pleasure than the arrival of bold, new voices. It’s why we venture to festivals and pore over a variety of different features that might bring to light some emerging talent. This year was an especially notable time for new directors making their stamp, and we’re highlighting the handful of 2018 debuts that most impressed us.

Below, one can check out a list spanning a variety of different genres and distributions, from those that barely received a theatrical release to wide bows. In years to come, take note as these helmers (hopefully) ascend.

Blockers (Kay Cannon)

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Blockers doesn’t pull off the impossible so much as it turns the tables on a common formula, finding something fresh, empowering, and hilarious in that time-old story of a group of friends making a pact to lose their V-card on prom night. Directed by Kay Cannon in her debut, there are a few more real-world complications for our leads, including Lisa (Leslie Mann), a single mother with an unhealthy obsession with her daughter; Mitchell (John Cena), a buff yet sensitive dad in a committed marriage; and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz), a party boy with surprising depth. This studio comedy even finds room for a tender (yet still very funny) coming out story to overbearing parents. – John F. (full review)

Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)

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A confident, clear-eyed debut by director Carlos López Estrada and writing duo Rafael Casal and (Hamilton alumni) Daveed Diggs, Blindspotting is a film of heightened, theatrical rhythm that builds layers of feeling and performance into both its comedy and drama; providing a propulsive movement that gives this story of class, race and gentrification a rare kind of joyful energy that leaves the viewer unconscious of the political realities of these issues until they come crashing back, manifested in the daily lives of the people who make Oakland what it is. – Josh L.

Cam (Daniel Goldhaber)

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It’s scary to be a woman online, where safe places don’t exist and any creep can look up your address if he pleases. That horror hasn’t fully acknowledged this 21st-century truth is evidence that the genre sometimes needs a woman’s touch in order to fully bring to light what’s truly scary. While the directorial debut of Daniel Goldhaber, Cam, unlike most horror films this decade, feels relevant in large part thanks to screenwriter Isa Mazzei who forces viewers to confront the horror of a total loss of agency in the digital age. – Willow M.

Custody (Xavier Legrand)

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Custody shows domestic abuse isn’t something that comes and goes. It’s not a 0-60 scenario where some days escalate and others don’t. Life perpetually travels at 80 mph instead. You must be ready for any outcome because your predator is as desperate to find you as you are to escape. And when your only connection is a young boy who can’t help being coerced by constant questioning and outside interference, isolation isn’t permanent. – Jared M. (full review)

Den of Thieves (Christian Gudegast)

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Writer/director Christian Gudegast exploded early in 2018 with this stunning 2-hour, 20-minute piece of pop sleaze cinema. His debut Den of Thieves is Heat by way of Monster energy drink; all the broad strokes of an exciting crime drama but slick, sweaty and loud, and chock-full of all the cartoonishly toxic machismo and grease-stained details you could ask for. Gerard Butler brilliantly fills in the Pacino role as “Big Nick,” a drunken, divorced gorilla cop whose violent tendencies are displayed as prominently as his cheap-takeout-filled beard.” – Josh L.

Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)

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Eighth Grade, the comedic-dramatic study of a 13-year-old girl which marks comedian and writer-director Bo Burnham’s freshman venture into feature filmmaking, is a sometimes sidesplitting, sometimes gut-wrenching film in which, on a certain level, nothing of any tremendous significance happens. And yet, with Burnham’s immensely empathetic observations of character psychology, clever choices of structure and editing, and cinematographer Andrew Wehde’s striking closeup shots and dreamy, saturated color palette, we are brought so close into the emotionally turbulent world of a struggling middle schooler that every petty social pitfall and personal triumph carries the emotional weight that many lesser films resort to pure shock value to achieve. Dialogue about Snapchat, vlogging and sexting isn’t just there to proclaim the film’s up-to-the-minute relevance, either: the film is almost an oblique science fiction piece, insofar as it repeatedly interrogates how the technology of ubiquitous ultra-networked devices uniquely affects the psychological, social and sexual realities of a generation of Americans living their formative years in the shadow of Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. Eighth Grade isn’t just the definitive tween comedy of the 2010s: it’s an accomplished piece of impressionist cinema which announces the arrival of a potentially electrifying young talent. – Eli F.

The Great Buddha+ (Huang Hsin-yao)

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Huang Hsin-Yao is a new voice in independent Taiwanese cinema, and his first narrative feature–an adaptation of his short film The Great Buddha–carries itself with all of the vitriol that one would expect from somebody angry at the state of the Taiwanese film industry and government. This is apparent from the outset of The Great Buddha+, when Huang speaks to the audience as the credits roll, speaking harshly about the producers and delivering a personal statement. This anger remains throughout–a character named after the producer that Huang is particularly dissatisfied with is even killed off in a darkly humorous manner. – Jason O. (full review)

The Guilty (Gustav Möller)

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The Guilty is an exhilarating, minimalist thriller that effectively sinks its hooks in, despite its bland, melodramatic title. In the vein of Locke and My Dinner with Andre, it isn’t exactly a one-man show fronted by Jakob Cedergren, but works as well as it does thanks to director Gustav Möller’s taut editing, voice cast, and sound effects that create a haunting scene halfway through the film without a drop of onscreen blood. – John F. (full review)

Hereditary (Ari Aster)

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Hereditary functions as a perfect directorial debut in the sense that while it is a skillful and cine-literate genre film, it’s also immensely showy and attention-grabbing work. Like a finely tuned mechanism, writer-director Ari Aster’s horror drama coldly hammers its audience with grim atmosphere and an oppressive sense of lingering dread, delivering twist after bone-chilling twist until the protagonist’s head quite literally twists off. Hereditary achieves more in its opening thirty nerve-jangling minutes than most middling horror movies can pull off in their entire runtimes, and still successfully steers its battered audience through a climax of searing and surreal terror. Let’s not take for granted how rare it is to see a new film and wonder what the hell could have possibly happened in the maker’s life to inspire such a deeply resonant tale. Aster’s feature debut achieves this result with disturbing precision. – Tony H.

Notes on an Appearance (Ricky D’Ambrose)

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Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance is a sophisticated work that runs the conceptual gamut. At times minimalist, at times overwhelming, the film marks a prominent new voice in the art-cinema–one with a promising arsenal of influences that include Brecht, Bresson, Straub/ Huillet, Heidegger, among others–that will only get better as it further comes into its own. D’Ambrose has developed into an astute aesthetician, fluidly inserting fascinating aspects of the modern metropolitan quotidien such as maps, postcards, and newspaper editorials. Perhaps with this film behind him and more resources towards the next, his fascinating ideas will get their due. – Jason O.

PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams)

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PROTOTYPE‘s unique combination of archival footage and 3D imaging techniques creates an image of the past that is chiefly concerned with space over time, playing out like a performance of the Galveston storm rather than a simple retelling of the event through a use of historical footage. The mixture of historical fact with cinematic experimentation in PROTOTYPE does not feel like a case of exploiting the former merely for the sake of pulling off dazzling visual tricks on the viewer’s spatio-temporal sensibilities. Rather, Williams’ film plays like both a memorial to the often overlooked natural disaster — which, in today’s climate of near-constant ecological catastrophe, feels all the more necessary — and an exploration into the what could have been in terms of the very modes and technologies we’ve developed to represent the past and the spaces we currently occupy. – Andrew W. (full review)

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)

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Not just the broad, Marx-happy partisan screed it has sometimes been mistaken for, longtime musician Boots Riley’s debut film is less Sergei Eisenstein and more Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: an inspiringly demented dystopian comedy in which funhouse-mirror reflections of 2010s America give poetic, uproarious form and life to the myriad anxieties (economic, social, racial, personal) of a middle-class African-American millennial in a class struggle and an existential rut. An outsider to Hollywood, Riley is blessedly untainted by the strictures of Screenwriting 101 formalism, freeing him up to follow messy, absurdist flights of free-associative craziness to whatever wildly unpredictable ends they may lead. Riley never stops rolling out twisted surprises, and it’s that restless comic energy combined with a poignant sense of the absurdity of life in Trump’s America that makes this a definitive piece of popular art expressing the worldview of a wayward, anxious generation. It’s hard not to be left wanting still more servings of Riley’s twisted, on-point imagination. – Eli F.

A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper)

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One of cinema’s most adaptable and self-reflexive premises–that of burgeoning celebrity and retaining relevance in a constantly changing culture–is revisited in the equally mercurial 21st century. With Bradley Cooper’s iteration of A Star is Born, the industry implicated therein may have shifted from film to music, but the large-scale celebrity commentary and the more honed-in power dynamics wrestled with remain the same. And who better than the effervescent Lady Gaga to fill the shoes of past leads? Her Ally’s shift from relatable and desperate mundanity to grandiose superstardom is juxtaposed purposefully with that of Cooper’s downwardly spiraling, dismal counterpart Jack. With unique cinematography from Matthew Libatique that effortlessly blends comfortable rural life with alienating urban settings, the film is a poignant and passionate look at the double-edged sword of fame, the constant metamorphosis of culture, and the inner-workings of a doomed romance. – Jason O.

Summer 1993 (Carla Simón)

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Here’s a harrowing memoir that understands what it is like to undergo – and hopelessly try to overcome – an unspeakable trauma, and does it from the perspective of a 6-year-old girl replete with so much grit and no-nonsense swagger to measure up to Mustang‘s Lale and Léon: The Professional‘s Mathilda. Summer 1993 is a poignant first feature by Carla Simón, who has found in 10-year-old Laia Artigas a preternaturally talented force of nature, and an irresistible alter-ego. Our review here. – Leonardo G.

The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico)

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Is The Wild Boy indescribable? On the most fundamental level, the directorial debut feature of Bertrand Mandico is certainly not: its structure and central conflict is more-or-less a direct cross between the rebellious coming-of-age story and the sea adventure. But it would be equally misleading to say that this film is in any way stale, rote, or conventional. For this is one of the more truly strange visions from narrative cinema in the past few years, one that dares and succeeds as much as it fails. To call it bizarre would be an understatement. – Ryan S. (full review)

Wildlife (Paul Dano)

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After reading Richard Ford’s Wildlife, Paul Dano saw so much of himself in the teenage boy dealing with his parents’ disintegrating marriage, that he turned it into one of the most affecting portraits of youth ever put on film. Shot with the precise eye of a seasoned master, Wildlife ironically achieves what its characters find impossible to do, it finds balance in chaos, turning powerful images and rich, literary dialogues into the perfect marriage. – Jose S.

Honorable Mentions

Since we’ll have a dedicated look soon at the year’s best documentaries, we didn’t feature those debuts here, including highlights Hale County, This Morning This Evening and Minding the Gap. As for narrative films, BlameThoroughbreds, Searching, The Cakemaker, and Werewolf nearly made the cut.

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