The 20 Best Breakthrough Directors Of 2015

Year-end season continues apace, and after listing 2015’s best posters and best trailers, we looked at the breakthrough performances of 2015 yesterday, featuring a promising a selection of new performers. But as ever, the talent hasn’t just been emerging in front of the camera: from the festival circuit to multiplex blockbusters, we’ve seen all kinds of directors breaking through in 2015.

Last year, we featured filmmakers like Ana Lily Amirpour, Damien Chazelle, Dan Gilroy, Jeremy Saulnier, Justin Simien and Gillian Robespierre. Who’s joined them this year? Below, you’ll find twenty filmmakers, spanning English-language and foreign movies, fiction and non-fiction, blockbuster erotica to throwback horror-westerns, music biopics to Holocaust dramas. Check out our list, and let us know in the comments who made an impression on you in 2015.

Click here for our complete coverage of the best of 2015

Desiree Akhavan — “Appropriate Behavior”

Given its Brooklyn setting and frank depiction of sex, the specter of becoming “the next Lena Dunham” shadows Desiree Akhavan, the 29-year-old Iranian-American filmmaker behind “Appropriate Behavior.” Fortunately, the comparison is more than superficial, and according to most, the film only shares the strengths of Dunham’s work —sharp, acerbic humor, painful autobiographical situations and a fresh, unique voice. A New York-raised daughter of Iranian immigrants, Akhavan studied film at Tisch at New York University, and was best known before this year for web series “The Slope.” But “Appropriate Behavior,” in which she also stars as a bisexual Brooklyn girl reeling from a break-up, should at the very least be a “Tiny Furniture”-style boost, aided by a brief acting role on the fourth season of “Girls.” Akhavan upped sticks to the U.K. this year, developing a comedy about a bisexual woman for the BBC‘s Channel 4 —let’s hope we get to see it some time in 2016, because she’s one of the sharpest new comic talents we’ve seen in a long while.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez — “The Stanford Prison Experiment”
While it’s the third feature film from Alvarez, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” a retelling of the infamous 1971 psychology experiment pioneered by Dr Philip Zimbardo, sees him take a big leap in terms of craft and directorial authority. Taking an excellent, tight script by Tim Talbott, previously best known as a “South Park ” writer, Alvarez makes effortless-looking work of a deceptively difficult scenario. Starring an exciting who’s-who of young male acting talent (Tye Sheridan, Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Logan Miller, Thomas Mann, Keir Gilchrist, Johnny Simmons), most of the actors, especially Angarano, Ezra Miller and Billy Crudup as Zimbardo, are given individual moments to shine (albeit darkly —this is a very rigorous, unforgiving film), but it’s never less than an ensemble. Alvarez’ ability to communicate the claustrophobia and desperation of the surroundings is equally impressive (helped along by the actual containment of the set) without making the film feel un-cinematic. Best of all is the difficult tone, that somehow seems completely under Alvarez’ control here. It’s gruelling to see these young men turn on each other in progressively more blunt and bullying ways, yet there is an underlying sense of jet-black irony that makes the film extra compelling, as the roles of prisoner and guard, bully and victim, test subject and observer, shift and reverse amorphously throughout.

Sean Baker — “Tangerine”

So Baker’s last film “Starlet” could really be seen as his first breakout, gaining widespread acclaim and making a emerging acting star in Dree Hemingway. But we can’t not mark his next big step up, as “Tangerine” seems to have rightly gained him even greater exposure, and for a different set of reasons. Unlike many directors we’ve listed previously who use the profile that an indie hit bestows to break into the bigger-budget bracket or even into Hollywood, Baker seems like a bona fide independent filmmaker, with a plucky, old-school lemons/lemonade attitude to moviemaking. So his inspiration for “Tangerine,” which follows two transgender sex workers on an odyssey through downtown LA on Christmas Eve, came from looking out his window, and when financing proved tricky, he shot it all on an iPhone 5s. The resulting movie is a riot —a funny, foul, delirious gallop through street-level LA that never feels anything less than cinematic. It’s a small film, to be sure, but considering the gulf between the resources available and the quality of the finished product, there was no bigger achievement in 2015.

Lyric R. Cabral & David Felix Sutcliffe — “(T)error”
Here’s further evidence, if you needed it, that we’re living in a golden age of documentary: “(T)error” is a gripping, sobering, ever-more-timely account of the underhanded tactics put in place by the FBI following 9/11 in its quest to nip domestic terrorism plots in the bud. But it is also an unmissable portrait of one man, FBI informant Saeed, the psychological toll the job has taken on him and the incredible story of one particular operation that ends in an (as far as we know) completely unjustified arrest and eventual incarceration. Aside from the quality of the filmmaking (Cabral is an acclaimed photojournalist), what sets this film apart is the level of access that the directors got to Saeed and to his target (who also talks frankly to them about the Kafka-esque situation he finds himself in). Of course, it didn’t come easy —the film was six years in the making, only after Saeed, who’d been friendly with Cabral for years prior, one day told her he was a living under an assumed identity as a paid FBI informant. Lesser filmmakers might have simply milked this fascinating subject for all he was worth, but Cabral and Sutcliffe never lose sight of the bigger picture, and how the actions of this one increasingly paranoid, possibly delusional man are the direct result of an inhuman and presumably illegal security policy. That profound intelligence is part of the reason the doc picked up a Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and makes us hugely anticipate whatever Cabral and Sutcliffe do next.

Joel Edgerton — “The Gift”

Actor Joel Edgerton has been turning up in ensemble movies and with little fanfare being their (sometimes sole) redeeming feature for so long now that it feels like his job description. But he’s also been building his writer’s resumé, getting a story credit for David Michod‘s “The Rover” and co-writing a few titles with his brother Nash, as well as a rewrite for upcoming Natalie Portman western “Jane Got A Gun.” He also made his directorial debut with “The Gift,” which he also wrote and in which he also co-stars, once again quietly stealing the film from putative leads Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall just by being stealthily brilliant as the creepy Gordo, who begins to terrorize newly arrived young couple Simon and Robyn. It’s a pared-back, unpretentious genre film, but one that is put together with real confidence, shot by rising star DP Eduardo Grau and perfectly paced and measured throughout. It turns out Edgerton is not just as good a director as he is an actor, but he’s good in kind of the same way: his directing style is unobtrusive, understated and remarkably mature for a neophyte. He’s clearly been paying close attention on set all these years (and perhaps learned exactly what not to do from “Exodus: Gods and Kings” —ME-OW!!!!!!).