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4. Jonathan Levine: Levine made his feature debut with the still unreleased in America 2006 film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, creating a riveting horror movie that stood out for what it didn’t do. As I wrote in my review, Levine took “the slasher film blueprint and, without necessarily doing anything particularly original with it, created a dead teenager movie that you can appreciate not for its campy gloriousness, its machete gore, its body count, or the T & A. In fact, he’s done something I’d never even considered before: He’s crossed Friday the 13th with … Heathers. ” Levine took that promise, and directed one of last year’s best films, The Wackness, which Prisco described as “one of the finest acted films I’ve seen in a long time, but it doesn’t take an easy path in the telling. In fact, it’s a pretty unpleasant tale told with a spirit of honesty and sense of humor that Levine’s more experienced contemporaries cannot come close to approximating.” It’s a phenomenal, heartbreaking film, and Levine blends narrative with music better than any director has since Cameron Crowe. And though his first film remains unreleased, and his second film barely put a dent in the box-office, Hollywood has seen enough of Levine’s talent to attach him to two more films, the irreverent comedy, The Sitter and the romantic thriller, Positive.

3. Rian Johnson: There’s little we can add to the praise we’ve showered upon Rian Johnson since his debut film, Brick, of which Dan wrote: “To high schoolers, the minutia of their routines and the ever-changing sociopolitical landscape of who hates whom tend to supersede rational thought. Rian Johnson, the writer and director of the phenomenal neo-noir-via-home-ec thriller Brick, understands this completely and, because he does, what could have been a gimmick becomes a shattering tale of love and heartbreak, told between the lockers and the portables. It’s one of the most willfully original thrillers to come along in quite a while, and fantastic to boot.” Brick has since gone on to become one of those great cult films that’s slowly being discovered by more and more people. Expect even more to search it out after seeing his sophomore effort, The Brothers Bloom (due out May 15, in limited release). Johnson has reinvigorated the Wes Anderson style of filmmaking, and once again, deftly crossed genres, creating a love story / con man film that is as poignant as it is suspenseful. Johnson, after Brick, had enough clout to write and direct The Brothers Bloom on his own terms, and looks to continue broadening his resume as one of the best up and coming writer/directors in Hollywood with Looper, a sci-fi flick he’s currently working on.

2. J.J. Abrams: This one almost feels like a cheat. Abrams has been in television for a decade, and has been writing scripts for nearly 20 years. But Star Trek is just his second feature film as a director. He’s surrounded himself with so much talent (Matt Reeves, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof) that until Mission Impossible III came out, I had reserved judgment on him as a director. But he succeeded in his debut effort, despite the unfortunate presence of Tom Cruise, which marred an otherwise thrilling summer blockbuster that I described as “an adrenaline-fueled, high-octane, diesel-powered, heart-surging cinematic vehicle that picks your ass up and takes you speeding through the scenic route before ultimately running out of gas and leaving you on the curb with your pants around your ankles, spent, exhausted, and in desperate need of a Parliament Light.” His movies may not belong on the same category as the other four directors on this list, but Abrams is the kind of guy I want directing huge, massively budgeted summer blockbusters. They may be empty spectacles, but if the advance word on Star Trek is any indication, at least a modicum of thought goes into them. It’s a nice change-of-pace to inject a little storyline in between explosions. It wouldn’t bother me at all to see Abrams eventually supplant Michael Bay as the summer blockbuster king.

1. Thomas McCarthy: Like Abrams, McCarthy has also been around nearly two decades, only McCarthy is an actor. You’d probably recognize his face, even if you couldn’t place his name (he was Scott Templeton in “The Wire,” Kevin Riley in “Boston Public,” and had a couple of solid supporting roles in Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck). But McCarthy’s most worthy accomplishments are the two films he’s written and directed, The Station Agent and The Visitor, quiet meditations on overcoming loneliness. Dan summed both films up in his review of The Visitor: “What made The Station Agent so good was its honest look at the complicated ways people connect with each other, and how someone can stumble into your life one day and become an irreplaceable part of it inside a week. McCarthy has preserved that sense of honest discovery in The Visitor, an engaging, expertly drawn, and moving examination of one man’s empty life and the way he comes to fill it again.” While McCarthy may never become a particularly well-known director, to me, he’s the most impressive on this list for his ability to quietly tell a story. There’s no stylistic flourishes, there’s no huge explosions and genre blending. McCarthy just focuses on character and story, and in doing so, has created two of the most moving and emotionally rich films of the last five years.

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Posted by: Forbiddendonut at May 8, 2009 12:07 PM