One of the most rewarding aspects of watching movies is seeing the emergence of new talent. Here are some pleasant surprises from the past year.
1. Denis Villenueve: Because Incendies is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that this little known French-Canadian director adapted the screenplay from a play. In fact, he created the most gripping film of the year.
2. Jessica Chastain: She’s on everybody’s “breakthrough” list for a damn good reason. First, she delivered a fine performance as an enabling 1950s mom in the most coherent part of The Tree of Life. She followed that with a riveting performance as a 1960s Mossad agent (the younger version of Helen Mirren’s character) in the thriller The Debt. In Take Shelter, she plays a well-grounded housewife who must deal with a mentally disintegrating husband. She won critical praise for the trashy but aspiring housewife in a film I haven’t seen – The Help. She’s a tough cop in The Texas Killing Fields. And then she’s in Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
Six movies in six months – that’s quite a way to start a career. And she’s at the top of her game in all of them, playing soft and tough, brittle and sexy, action and romance.
3. Nicholas Winding Refn: With apologies to Ryan Gosling, Refn is the real star of the vivid and compelling Drive. He has a great eye and a great sense of pacing, and could produce a masterpiece with the right material.
4. Michel Hazanavicius: He came out of nowhere to strike gold with The Artist. Who would think to make a silent film today? Everyone will want to see what he can come up with next.
5. Shailene Woodley: Her performance is absolutely essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.
6. Ben Ripley: The key to Source Code is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley. In a year with at least some smart action films, Ripley’s is the smartest. He came up with the scifi premise that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again. Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity? Ripley had us on the edge of our seats.
7. Ryan Gosling: He has already established himself as one of our best actors (Half Nelson, All Good Things, Blue Valentine), so why is he on this list? Because this year he has broken out of quirky roles in indies and has carried more mainstream films. He proved that he can play an action star (Drive) and also be the funniest guy in a Steve Carell comedy (Stupid Crazy Love). And he proved that he can carry a George Clooney movie as the male lead holding his own with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti (The Ides of March). He could be looking at a Clooney/Hanks/Nicholson career.