The 25 Best Breakthrough Directors Of 2016

Garth Davis – “Lion”
“Top Of The Lake” remains one of the best TV dramas of the last ten years, and much of the credit rightly goes to Jane Campion who wrote and directed much of the show. Her co-director Garth Davis also did excellent work, and though it’s taken a few years, he looks set to become one a sought-after filmmaker. The Australian director started in TV before becoming an award-winning commercial director (taking the Gold Lion at Cannes in 2008), and then returning to fiction for “Top Of The Lake.” This year, he made his feature debut with “Lion,” starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman: the film is the Weinstein Company‘s big Oscar hope this year and a crowd-pleaser of real force. Davis is already wrapped on followup “Mary Magdalene,” and the extraordinary cast of the Biblical tale —Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tahar Rahim— speaks to how hot Davis is right now.

The Duffer Brothers – “Stranger Things”
We’re at an interesting time, in which writer/directors can make their name not necessarily with a breakout Sundance indie, but by creating and directing their own TV series. Sam Esmail did it last year with “Mr. Robot,” and now the Duffer Brothers are the latest to pull off the trick, with their Netflix sensation “Stranger Things.” The North Carolina natives sold a script to Warner Bros. soon after graduating college, but the result, which they also helmed, contained horror-thriller “Hidden” starring Alexander Skarsgard and Andrea Riseborough, and was shunted around the release schedule and only finally saw the light of day on video last year. In the meantime, their pitch for “Stranger Things” ended up with Shawn Levy’s production company, and after dozens of turn-downs, was picked up by Netflix, becoming one of the service’s most talked-about shows and making a bigger pop-culture impact than most blockbuster movies this year. The Duffers directed a big chunk of the episodes, and did a damn fine job with it —now, virtually every door is open for them.

Robert Eggers – “The Witch”
In a boom year for the horror genre, one of the best (and most unexpectedly successful) was “The Witch,” an artful period movie about a family of New Englanders in the 1600s whose infant is abducted —it’s a blend of “The Shining” and Ingmar Bergman, according to director Eggers. Winner of the Directing Award at Sundance when it premiered there nearly two years ago, it’s a film that mostly eschews gore and cheap jump scares in favor of a pervading atmosphere of dread, some truly striking imagery, real thematic meat and a very clear facility for working with actors. With the film being a critical and commercial triumph, Eggers has been lining up future projects: medieval tale “The Knight,” a remake of “Nosferatu” and a miniseries about Rasputin for “House Of Cards” producers Media Rights Capital.

Kelly Fremon Craig – “The Edge Of Seventeen”
We have to confess that we’d come pretty close to dismissing “The Edge Of Seventeen” from a distance —it had early indications of being a fairly familiar kind of teen movie, and a status as the closing movie at the Toronto International Film Festival generally means it is best avoided. But the Hailee Steinfeld starrer turned out to be a rare gem, a heartfelt, witty and authentic coming-of-age movie that marks the arrival of a brilliant comic talent in writer-director Craig. The filmmaker’s only credit to date was the script for the better-than-you’d-think Alexis Bledel vehicle “Post-Grad,” but while that film virtually went unseen, it got the attention of James L. Brooks. The filmmaker behind classics like “Broadcast News” and “Terms Of Endearment” produced “The Edge Of Seventeen,” and it’s not hard to see what he saw in her: her emotionally resonant, sharp character comedy is reminiscent of both the work of Brooks and some of his previous proteges like Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson.

Ciro Guerra – “Embrace Of The Serpent”
It opened way back in February (and premiered all the way back at Cannes in 2015), but there were few better movies in 2016 than Guerra’s “Embrace Of The Serpent.” The 35-year-old Colombian helmer made his directorial debut “Wandering Shadows” at the age of just 23: his follow-up “The Wind Journeys” screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2009, and both films were picked by Colombia to be their representative at the Oscars, though neither were nominated. But “Embrace Of The Serpent” made the cut —a remarkable, black-and-white travelogue through the Amazon in two timelines and a masterpiece of post-colonial cinema with an astonishing visual eye, it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, the first Colombian movie to achieve the feat. Guerra will direct his next film, a desert-set 1970s crime pic called “Birds Of A Passage,” early next year, but he’s also planning a trip to Hollywood: he’s attached to dystopian thriller “The Detainee” from the producers of “John Wick” and “Sicario.”