This Is Cinema Now: 21st Century Debuts

All Is Forgiven

Mia Hansen-Løve made her feature debut with this sensitive chronicle of estrangement, redemption, and the indissoluble parent-child bond, in which a man’s self-loathing and addiction take their toll on his wife and young daughter.

Corpo Celeste

Alice Rohrwacher’s extraordinarily impressive debut feature chronicles 13-year-old Marta’s private duel with the Church in the small seaside Calabrian town to which she, her mother, and older sister have just moved from Switzerland.

The Face You Deserve

Portuguese fabulist Miguel Gomes explores the bitter realities of adulthood and the eternal wonder of youth in this imaginatively loopy, anything-goes take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Frownland

Nonprofessional actor Dore Mann plunges himself into the role of a self-described “troll” who lives with an arrogant roommate in a wretched Brooklyn apartment and sells disability benefit coupons door-to-door in Ronald Bronstein’s film, shot with a tiny crew and a ragtag style on 16mm.

The Forest for the Trees

An elementary-school teacher moves to a new city to start over following a breakup, but shoots herself in the foot at every turn in The Forest for the Trees, which announced the arrival of Maren Ade’s idiosyncratic cinematic perspective.

Funny Ha Ha

The film that kickstarted the DIY revolution known as “Mumblecore,” Andrew Bujalski’s wry portrait of post-college aimlessness and ennui is the prototype for the lo-fi audiovisual style and realer-than-real life naturalism that would define the movement.

Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning horror phenomenon gave American viewers a powerful racial allegory for the ages, sending Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris to a terrifying white suburban enclave that seems intent on capturing his body and soul for some unknown purpose.

The Babadook

Jennifer Kent’s visually stunning horror debut—in which a young widow and her disturbed 7-year-old son are haunted by the sudden presence of a sinister children’s book—reminds us that the things that go bump in the night may be buried deep inside our psyches, not just in the basement.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

Shot on black-and-white 16mm, and featuring original songs by Justin Hurwitz, Damien Chazelle’s first film is a resourceful, low-budget Boston-set musical about a jazz trumpeter with a wandering eye and his introverted, out-of-work ex-girlfriend.

Medicine for Melancholy

Shot in luscious sepia tones, Barry Jenkins’s feature debut—with Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins as hipsters whose one-night stand stretches into a 24-hour odyssey through the city—considers what it means to be young, black, and bohemian in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco.

Historias extraordinarias

Q&A with Mariano Llinás

Thick with incident and ironic twists, this novelistic, endlessly engrossing experience from the director of La Flor plays out as a series of nested Borgesian narratives that zigzag across different characters, locations, and genres.

The Human Surge

Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, Eduard Williams’s wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future.

Drift

Friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space.

La Ciénaga

One of the all-time great debut films, La Ciénaga announced the arrival of Lucrecia Martel, a daring new voice in Argentine cinema, and constituted a mesmerizing portrait of the privileged class far gone in decay, unanchored from religion, nature, marital or blood ties.

Oxhide

Over the course of 23 carefully choreographed shots, we watch young filmmaker Liu Jiayin, her parents, and their cat act out a thinly fictionalized version of the life they share in a cramped Beijing apartment, where her father makes leather handbags.

La Libertad

The landmark feature debut by Lisandro Alonso chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of the largely solitary existence of a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas.

Japón

Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light) first emerged on the international film landscape with this visually intoxicating tale of a suicidal man from Mexico City who finds renewed love and desire when he meets an elderly village woman; Japón reaches for the sublime as it ponders sex, suffering, and spirituality.

Mysterious Object at Noon

Part road movie, part folk storytelling exercise, part surrealist party game, this beguiling first feature by Apichatpong Weerasethakul finds the Thai director traveling the length of Thailand asking villagers to invent episodes in an ever-expanding story.

Kaili Blues

A country doctor is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother intends to sell; Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him. Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future.

Nana

A young girl comes home one day to an empty house, her mother mysteriously missing, in this unsettlingly ambiguous anti–fairy tale.

Mundane History

Anocha Suwichakornpong (By the Time It Gets Dark) debuted with this beautiful and narratively digressive film that’s ostensibly about a filmmaker paralyzed after an accident and the male nurse taking care of him, but morphs into a dazzling existential odyssey.

Neighboring Sounds

In his thrilling debut, Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) delves into the lives of a group of prosperous middle-class families residing on a quiet street in Recife, close to a low-income neighborhood.

O Fantasma

Portugal’s João Pedro Rodrigues The Ornithologist has gone on to be one of the most exciting, unabashedly queer directors working today, and his invigoratingly kinky debut O Fantasma is a grimy psychosexual odyssey and a deeply felt howl of queer anguish and alienation.

Policeman

A boldly conceived drama pivoting on the initially unrelated activities of an elite anti-terrorist police unit and some wealthy young anarchists, Policeman is the striking first feature from Israeli director Nadav Lapid, a powerfully physical film in its depiction of the muscular, borderline sensual way the macho cops relate to one another.

12:08 East of Bucharest

On December 22, 2005, a group of characters commemorate the 16th anniversary of Ceausescu’s fall. What seems like a formally simple and straightforward story is actually a sophisticated and wryly funny reflection on the scope of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 that ended communism in Romania.

Primer

Few American debuts of the 21st century have been bolder than this lo-fi sci-fi by multi-hyphenate auteur Shane Carruth, in which a circle of anonymous, white-shirt scientists turn their suburban garage into a time-travel portal.

Donnie Darko

Richard Kelly’s unnerving, supremely entertaining portrait of millennial angst starring Jake Gyllenhaal was underappreciated when released immediately post-9/11, but has since become one of the defining cult films of the new century.

Unrelated

In the 2007 debut from Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir), middle-aged, discontented Anna decides to spend her summer holiday apart from her husband, in Tuscany with her friends, only to find herself more attuned to their teenage children. Tom Hiddleston co-stars.

Bungalow

The celebrated debut of Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56) is a minimalist portrait of a young German soldier named Paul (Lennie Burmeister) who goes AWOL and returns to his childhood home in the countryside.

Film Comment Talk: 21st Century Debuts

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