New Directors/New Films 2022: 10 Must-See Movies from Major Emerging Talents

“The African Desperate” (directed by Martine Syms) 

The festival’s closing night selection promises to end the event on a high, unexpectedly hilarious note. Artist Martine Syms’ feature debut seems to be suffused with all the same themes and concepts as her previous work – namely, contemporary black identity, queer theory, and the power of language – but put together inside a thrilling new package. Starring fellow artist Diamond Stingily as her protagonist Palace, “The African Desperate” seems to chronicle a world the duo know a lot about: American art schools, so often white, rigid, and not too interested in mixing things up. 

When Palace earns her MFA from an upstate art school (of note, Syms’ MFA is from Bard, while her co-writer, Rocket Caleshu, earned his MFA from Cal Arts), she opts to skip out on graduation festivities ASAP, heading back to her hometown of Chicago instead. What follows is 24 hours in Palace’s wild life that are, per the film’s IMDb description, pops with its filmmaker’s “celebrated conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary to the cinematic form.” —KE 

“The Apartment with Two Women” (directed by Kim Se-in)

After traveling around the international festival circuit, including stops at Busan and Berlin, Kim Se-in’s prickly feature debut is finally bound for North America, and what a treat NYC audiences are in for with this auspicious outing. The Korean-language film stars Yang Mal-bok (who some eagle-eyed audiences will recognize from a small but pivotal turn in “Squid Game”) as Soo-kyung and Lym Ji-ho as Yi-jung, a fantastically, perhaps even fatally mismatched mother and daughter.  

The duo have long lived together in a single apartment, but their literal closeness has done nothing to bond them to each other, at least in a positive manner. Do you think your parents are hard to get along with? Can’t see eye to eye with your own kids? Look out. These two couldn’t be more different, and even though their lives seem to be pulling them in new directions – Soo-kyung has a new man in her life, Yi-jung is trying to figure out how to navigate office life – they can’t quite break free of the awkward hold they have on each other. 

And then Soo-kyung hits her only child with a car. She’s fine! It was an accident! And how much you believe either of those claims will likely color how the rest of the film unfolds, part family drama, part legal thriller, and an entirely unique outing about the bonds that keep a hold on us, for better and for worse. —KE  

“The Cathedral” (directed by Ricky D’Ambrose)

A pointillistic epic that splits the difference between a Russian novel and a Powerpoint presentation — between Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” and the saddest movie that Chris Marker never made — Ricky D’Ambrose’s “The Cathedral” incisively chronicles several tragic decades in the existence of a regular American family during the last decades of the 20th century.

Whereas Linklater stretches and elides time in order to crystallize moments of pure transcendence, D’Ambrose’s powerful inventory of personal grievances and national tragedies skips from one scarring moment to the next until its young hero can only understand the world by measuring his distance from it. Anchored by Brian d’Arcy James’ haunted performance as the protagonist’s financially aggrieved father, “The Cathedral” gradually reveals itself to be more of a mausoleum than anything else — a bone-deep blueprint of a place where people are abandoned long before they die. —DE

“Dos Estaciones” (directed by Juan Pablo González)

Mexican actress Teresa Sánchez was gifted with a face made for the cinema — her performance as the manager of a struggling Jalisco tequila factory in Juan Pablo González’s starkly subdued drama “Dos Estaciones” is reminiscent of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” as the actress communicates her frustrated impotence with the fate of her business in every misty-eyed close-up. The effect is bracingly raw.

González’s fiction is so indelibly tied to the reality of the character’s workplace and its inebriating spirit that certain segments of the film (particularly those focused on the painstaking work of making tequila) give the impression of watching an observational documentary; by juxtaposing footage of rudimentary pine gathering techniques with that of sophisticated modern machinery, he holistically traces a way of life under threat. —CA

“Fire of Love” (directed by Sara Dosa)

Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love” is a documentarian’s dream. With a truly amazing trove of archival footage taken by married volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, the movie is, seemingly, essentially handed to them. However, that surely didn’t make piecing together this vivid and soaringly heart-tugging documentary a simple task. The filmmakers have restored and re-assembled endless reels and dozens of hours of film and video footage dating back to the late 1960s into a witty portrait, aided amply by appropriately monotone and poetic narration from filmmaker Miranda July, and a soundtrack of go-to, let’s-run-toward-our-future pop classics like Brian Eno’s electronic anthem “The Big Ship.”

At an economical 90-minute running time, “Fire of Love” packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired as you contemplate a life lived at the edge of a 2,200-degree (°F) abyss. —RL

“Happening” (directed by Audrey Diwan)

​​At many points in Audrey Diwan’s weighty and naturalistic “Happening,” which beat heavyweights like “The Power of the Dog” and “Parallel Mothers” to win top prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall, Annie (Anamaria Vartolomei) opens her eyes wide. Her pupils shrink into tiny pinpoints. If she were a Marvel character, these would be the moments she transforms into her heroic alter-ego. But for Annie, a French literature student in 1963, power comes not from superhuman brawn but rather from strength of will: She’s several weeks into an unwanted pregnancy, and though abortions are illegal — punishable with prison time — she’s determined to find a way to terminate it.

Based on a memoir by Annie Ernaux, “Happening” is a clear-eyed and palpably authentic portrait of how — in the past, and increasingly in the present, as well — young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone. Diwan declines to polemicize, but her breakthrough film is inarguably in support of reproductive rights and the people to whom they inalienably belong. That it’s being released in the wake of renewed threats to such freedoms around the world makes Diwan’s movie feel all the more urgent, but there’s no didacticism here, just one woman’s true story. —NW

“The Innocents” (directed by Eskil Vogt)

The second film by “The Worst Person in the World” co-writer Eskil Vogt (whose underappreciated screenplay for Joachim Trier’s “Thelma” displayed a flair for abstruse psychological horror), “The Innocents” takes the stuff of a classic Stephen King story about creepy psychic children and infuses it with enough Scandinavian rigor to make it feel unsettling in a very different way.

Entirely set in and around a woodsy apartment complex where everyone is hurting behind closed doors, “The Innocents” offsets the barebones familiarity of its plot — little kids realize they have more power than their parents — with social realism and chilling matter-of-factness. Vogt’s film is so much “fun” for genre heads because of its steely disinterest in joy or wish fulfillment; “The Innocents” unflinchingly illustrates the banality of evil through a child’s understanding of moral consequence. —DE

“Nanny” (directed by Nikyatu Jusu) 

Ghosts are everywhere in Nikyatu Jusu’s atmospheric feature directorial debut (and Sundance winner) “Nanny,” though few of them look like we’ve come to expect from decades of horror films. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling, a particular twist of the wind. Sometimes, it’s a photograph. Sometimes, it’s a story. And, sometimes, just sometimes, it’s a whole person, gazing out from beyond, well, somewhere. From the start, there is a queasy energy to Jusu’s get-under-your-skin film, one made all the more unsettling to her dedication to showing a full-spectrum leading lady (your usual final girl, she is not) caught in a surprising milieu. 

Aisha (Anna Diop) is a Senegalese immigrant who has arrived in New York City with her own American Dream, though one that should really not feel so out of reach: she just wants her adorable young son Lamine, who is back in Senegal, to join her. When she gets a new job nannying for an affluent couple with a cute kid (Rose Decker), the steady paycheck seems destined to get Aisha and Lamine on the right track. But the real cost is one Aisha could never have seen coming. Jusu’s script, while prone to meandering through its second act, delivers a powerful punch as the film ratchets toward its inevitable conclusion. The first-time filmmaker may be attempting to fit too many ideas into one sleek package, but that doesn’t mitigate the truth of “Nanny”: All of it haunts. —KE

“Onoda — 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” (directed by Arthur Harari)

A privileged young Japanese soldier with daddy issues and a crippling fear of flying is presented with another path towards heroism during the last year of World War II when his commanding officer dispatches him to the hills of the Philippines’ Lubang Island and orders the boyish 22-year-old to stay alive at all costs. As punishment for refusing to become a Kamikaze pilot, Hiroo Onoda (Yuya Endo) is made into an undying emblem of the Emperor’s army; alone in the jungle and cut off from the outside world, Onoda takes his role so seriously that he continues to fight the war until 1974.

Based on the true story of a Japanese man who became a folk legend in his own time, Arthur Harari’s absorbing character study combines the slow-burn madness of “Apocalypse Now” with the operatically misguided nationalism of “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.” Immersive cinematography, disorienting patience, and memory-like narrative currents allow this 165-minute epic to feel like a lifetime even as it flies by, as “Onoda — 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” humanistically subverts a right-wing icon so devoted to his country that he abandoned the world. —DE

“Riotsville, USA” (directed by Sierra Pettengill)

“Riotsville, USA,” Sierra Pettengill’s transfixing and troubling archival documentary, feels like watching a Ken Burns film through a kaleidoscope. Relying exclusively on remarkable pre-existing footage, Pettengill tells the story of the development of the U.S. military’s riot management program in the late ’60s, formed in response to the civil rights uprisings in cities across the nation. The military held its riot training in these eponymous fake towns, constructed diorama-style to allow clean-cut soldiers to play-act as protesters, donning hippie clothing and long-haired wigs as they smashed the glass windows of make-believe businesses and overturned government-bought sedans.

Along with a star-studded group of collaborators — including the critic Tobi Haslett, who writes the keen and captivating running commentary, and masterful editor Nels Bangerter, who’s also worked with boundary-pushing documentarians Brett Storey and Kirsten Johnson — Pettengill periodically pokes and prods at this footage, zooming in to the point of pixelation or blurring the edges around figures to interrogate the meaning behind these moments. This unique framework succeeds in turning history on its head, forcing us to question how these violent tactics from the past have led to the increasingly armed present we’re witnessing today. —SG