Team Top Ten: Best Directors of the 21st Century

Steve McQueen didn't make the list but Fassy still loves him (as do many of our contributors)Amir here, to bring you the first edition of Team Top Ten, a communal list by all of Film Experience’s contributors that will sit in for our regular Tuesday Top Ten list once a month. For our first episode, we’ve decided to rank the best new directors of the 21st century. These are all directors who have made their first film after 2000. (Short films, TV and theatre work didn’t render anyone ineligible. Only feature length fiction and documentary films were considered.)  

I had a blast compiling the 18 lists of our contributors to arrive at the final ten because their submissions were incredibly eclectic and surprising. I’d made a bet with myself that Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) would top the list, and lo and behold, he failed to make the cut altogether, though by a very fine margin. Korean director Bong Joon Ho was also left off, despite showing up on more than a handful of lists. Jason Reitman, Joshua Marston, Rian Johnson and David Gordon Green all came very close too but this was a tightly contested race, evidenced by the three-way tie for our tenth spot. Overall, 71 directors got at least one vote. We travelled all the way from Japan to Portugal, from Greece to Mexico, via documentaries, comedies and superhero films. We loved stories about Muslim families, gay romances, World War II and the beautifully painted worlds of Sylvain Chomet. What we didn't like very much turned out to be actors-turned-directors, as current Oscar champ Ben Affleck got only a single vote, and George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones failed to manage even that.

In the end, these are the twelve men and women Team Experience considers the best (thus far) of the 21st century crop:

=10. Michel Gondry
Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine, The Sciene of Sleep, Block Party, Be Kind Rewind, etcetera

Gondry's films are shaggy fantasies powered by a boundless imagination. They're more than a little goofy, speaking quirky as if it were a language, and they have an endearing handmade quality, with their maker's fingerprints visible around the rough edges. Bent as they are toward romance and optimism, Gondry's miniature worlds provide a little solace from reality.
- Andreas Stoehr

11 more directors after the jump

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Harlem January 2nd

A Filmic Notion on The Red Shoes "...a film that 'could be' my all time favourite"
Awards Circuit on the breakthrough performers of 2012
Pajiba 15 pop culture moments that made us cry in 2012
Boy Culture continues their countdown of hottest actors of all time (#50-21) ranging from Buster Crabbe, to Tyrone Power through Christian Bale in this edition. But I've just been informed that Takeshi Kaneshiro is not on the list at all so someone will have to explain this word "hotness" to me!

Antagony & Ecstasy Tim shares his ten best of the year: Magic Mike, Oslo August 31st, Tabu and more... I wish I liked Oslo a bit more than I do but I'm thrilled that so many critics I like are suddenly enthused about Joachim Trier because I don't remember having much company when I was all "ohmygodeveryone Reprise !!!" a few years back.
Media Decoder on footing your own Oscar campaign. And no, this article is not about Ann Dowd. People do it every year.
Gawker Rich Juzwiack on the year in film. I've always loved Rich's writing but it's so weird to read a full "year in" piece in which I agree with quite literally nothing. haha 
Coming Soon promotional art for the next few years of Pixar films
Reverse Shot's top ten with The Deep Blue Sea an out of time chart topper

Link On Link Off

Old Hollywood loves Federico Fellini. Isn't that an amazing sketch (left)? It's Fellini's first rendering of Gelsomina from La Strada. 
The Sheila Variations a beautiful birthday piece about crushing on Ralph Macchio before The Karate Kid (!) and the transformational power of getting hooked on the storytelling arts and the actors who make us dream.
Thelma Adams corrals some friends to discuss the annual topic: does nudity equal bravery for actresses?
Your Movie Buddy (and ours) interviews Kirsten Dunst on Melancholia.
ioncinema Fox Searchlight signs the Borderline Film trio (Antonio Campos, Sean Durkin, and Josh Mond) to a first look deal. That filmmaking collective operates in such a cool way, alternating in the director's chair but sticking together and supporting each other. Their latest venture being the fab Martha Marcy May Marlene (my review if you missed it).
Little White Lies interviews our current favorite Norwegian director Joachim Trier on his new film Olso, August 31st

Coming Soon Gallery of on set images from Terrence Malick's Lawless starring The Driver and That Girl With the Tattoo. Now that Malick is making movies as fast as say, Martin Scorsese (Allen & Eastwood's clip will thankfully remain out of reach... that speed doesn't do many people favors), that 20 year gap between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line is looking ever more perplexing.
Tom Shone thoughts on Leonardo DiCaprio and a top ten. It's odd that I disagreed so much with the content of the article but apart from the weird preferencing of Blood Diamond, I totally get the top ten choices.
MNPP Jake Gyllenhaal on the subway. Stars... they're just like us!
Flickr awesome gallery of "the end" onscreen 
In Contention will be there for a Vanessa Redgrave AMPAS tribute in London next week 
Oh No They Didn't 13 Movie Poster trends from the legs spread stance, to floating heads in clouds threw sexy backs holding weaponry. 

Finally...

That's the Hunger Games cast doing one of those Vanity Fair shoots that make everyone look All American Rising Star Sun Dappled Models in the Great Outdoors. Doesn't it bother anyone that the movie is all about these people killing each other and yet it's like "yay, the cool kids. you could be their friend, too!"

London: W.E., Oslo and Japan

David here, reporting from the final week of the London Film Festival. If there's one name guaranteed to grab my attention, it's...

The sight of Madonna's name heading up movie credits is a slightly surreal one, and it's difficult to imagine the icon standing behind a camera, and so W.E.'s worst foible is an understandable one from such a deified person. Re-edited after a poor reception at previous festivals, there is a fair deal to admire here, but all those flashbulbs must have gone to her head, because the photography is stuffed with dramatically posed shots, as if its being filmed with a still camera. Yet it's in the camera work that the film digs up shards of emotional truth amongst the narrative cliches, suggesting that Madonna might prove a worthwhile director. When the camera moves, it does so with a defiant tactility, a visual sense alive with feeling and clarity. This story of a late-'90s neglected wife (Abbie Cornish) in New York turning to the story of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough, superbly poised) for comfort and reflection is the stuff of clunky parallels with little sense of historical ambiguity. The soundtrack is alarmingly overloaded. But the immediate, reactive sense of the photography delves through the physical to the emotional roots, scoring unpredictable truths. (C) more articles on W.E.

Oslo, August 31st is like two pages ripped from a diary; one covered with words, the second blank and sodden with tears. After his first feature, the textured novelistic Reprise, director Joachim Trier follows in Louis Malle's footsteps by adapting Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's Le feu follet, a melancholy tale of a man debating suicide. Anders Danielsen Lie, one of the two leads of Reprise, is given the luxury of a film to himself ...only his character, Anders, isn't one to luxuriate. The film's first half is full of words. Anders attempts to spread his wings, testing the waters of the outside world as he breaks from a spell in rehab. A discussion with his friend Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner) stretches imperceptibly to twenty minutes, dense with completely natural musings, arguments, and agonising admissions that absorb both characters and viewers. As Anders spirals into the night, and into August 31st, the film shifts into sensory expression, the lens focus shifting lucidly, the soundtrack slowly emptying to mournful desolation. Far from easy to watch, and tearfully inconclusive, this is nonetheless another quiet triumph from Trier. (A-) more articles on Oslo August 31st

two brothers in "I Wish"

Two brothers on a quest to repair their family. It's a story out of 1980s Hollywood cinema, and I Wish does ring with the cliches of quest narratives like Stand By Me or The Goonies. Hirokazu Kore-eda, a festival favourite thanks to films like Nobody Knows and After Life, directs this bright tale which centres around the supposed miracle that occurs when two bullet trains pass each other. Koichi and Ryu, each stuck with a parent on opposite sides of Kyushu, plot a voyage to witness the miracle and wish their family back together. Where Kore-eda betters his Stateside influences, though, is in his generous characterizations of the adult characters, who lack the intimacy we're granted with the vibrant kids but feel alive with both warmth and foibles. Inevitably, the film cycles through familiar ideas, but the wheels are so smooth it scarcely matters. The achievement of the quest isn't the thing, but the journey, and you're unlikely to find a more heartwarming, vibrant trip all year. (B+)

Foreign Oscar Track: Israel and Norway

Two more countries, neither of which have ever won the Foreign Film Prize in Hollywood, have announced their finalists lists.

We'll take Norway first since it's less popular with Oscar (5 nominations) and because I stand humbly before you to say I was wrong. My conjecture about what might be submitted -- other than the new Joachim Trier -- was quite wobbly. The three finalists are not the biggies from the Amanda awards but Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st (Oslo, 31. august) which we briefly discussed, Anne Sewitsky’s Happy, Happy (Sykt lykkelig) and Jens Lien’s Sons of Norway (Sønner av Norge). While Trier has the highest international profile, that doesn't always equate with submission choice. Happy Happy is a very frisky marital comedy (I ♥ the trailer) and Sons of Norway is a punk rock coming of age film that even features a cameo from Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. Neither of the trailers are subtitled and both feature nudity but if you want to see them they're here: Happy Happy and Sons of Norway.

Award winning filmmaker Joseph CedarIsrael, which has been nominated nine times (and thrice consecutively in recent years), just announced the nominees for their Oscars, the Ophir Awards.  This is always the list they pull from for their Best Foreign Language Film submission so it's probably going to be the 13 times nominated (whew) frontrunner Joseph Cedar's Footnote which played at Cannes winning the Screenplay award but garnering somewhat mixed reviews. It's about feuding father and son professors at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writer/director Joseph Cedar, who was actually born here in New York City, was previously nominated for the soldier drama Beaufort (2007). 

But if there's a dark horse submission it'll be one of these four: Yossi Madmoni's Restoration, Nadav Lapid's Policeman (Ha-Shoter) Marco Carmel's My Lovely Sister or Maya Kenig's Off White Lies... all of which are more difficult to find info on then the Norwegian films at this point.

Slowly Evolving Oscar Foreign Film Pages Are Here.