Ten Filmmakers That Will Define Cinema's Next Decade

10 mid-career directors, all in their 40s or younger. Some are obscure, others are pretty famous — but only a few are as well-known as they deserve to be.

1. Andrew Bujalski’s

Exceedingly dry DIY Boston-set twenty-something comedy “Funny Ha Ha” (2002) was the founding work of the so-called Mumblecore movement, an influence both on established indies like Noah Baumbach as well as new-comers Lena Dunham (who recently hosted a “Funny Ha Ha” 10th-anniversary screening). Bujalski, now 34 and based in Austin, has made two more equally deadpan and quirky features, “Mutual Attraction” and “Beeswax,” and has begun work on a fourth.

2. Joseph Cedar

Joseph Cedar was born in the US and works in Israel where, on the basis of four features, most recently the absurdist father-son tragedy “Footnote,” the 43-year-old filmmaker has established himself as the nation’s leading director. Like “Footnote,” his three previous movies — “Time of Favor” (2000), “Campfire” (2004), and “Beaufort” (2007) — are thoughtful meditations on the Jewish state, characterized by a bold use of social metaphor and a critical sense of the fissures in Israel’s social reality.

3. Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola has her critical ups (“Lost in Translation”) and downs (“Marie Antoinette”) and blahs (“Somewhere”), but the bottom line is that Francis Coppola’s 41-year-old daughter is a distinctive talent exhibiting great sensitivity in the direction of actors. Coppola has taste, vision, and a particular theme — in each of her four features, an unformed young woman must find her way in a confusing world. Coppola, however, shows no sense of being overawed by her material. Bottom line: She does what she wants.

4. Jia Zhangke

Jia Zhangke was the first Chinese independent to make a splash on the international film circuit where “Platform” (2002), and his other movies on China in transition and distinctive blend of fiction and documentary had the impact of bulletins from the front. The 42-year-old director’s last few movies have been official productions (his film in progress has been described as a “political” martial arts film) but he remains an inspiration and an example to a new generation of Chinese filmmakers.

5. Julia Loktev

Julia Loktev got her start in the art world making sound pieces and installations. All three features by this 43-year-old filmmaker, born in Russia and raised in the US, have been a challenge both for the director and the viewer. The title of her 1998 “Moment of Impact,” a documentary about her father’s disability, could be applied to her two subsequent features, the minimalist terror thriller “Day Night Day Night” (2006) and the “innocents abroad” drama “The Loneliest Planet” (2010). Each of her movies has been a struggle, and she declines to say what she’ll do next.

6. Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel has only made three sardonic, richly textured movies but this 46-year-old Argentine director is arguably the leading figure in the new wave of filmmaking that has come out of South America’s southern cone over the past dozen years. In “La ciénaga” (2001), “The Holy Girl” (2004), and “The Headless Woman” (2008), Martel established Argentina’s northwest outback as her own Yoknapatawpha County. She’s has been called a novelistic filmmaker — but, in her disinclination to spell out a narrative, she is a lot closer to Henry James than Charles Dickens.

7. Gerardo Naranjo

Gerardo Naranjo, 40, advanced to the forefront of the Mexico’s energetic young cinema with his third feature “I’m Gonna Explode” (2008), a high-school angst movie that transposed Jean-Luc Godard’s ultra-romantic “Pierrot le fou” to an upper-middle-class exurb of his hometown Guanajuato. His follow-up “Miss Bala” (2010), inspired by the true story of a Mexican beauty queen who became a pawn in the nation’s narco wars, is even more bravura in its filmmaking — an action “Alice in Wonderland.”

8. Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt, 47, made her first feature, “River of Grass” (an inept outlaw couple seek refuge in the Everglades) in 1994 and her second, “Old Joy” (two grown-apart friends go camping in the Pacific Northwest) 12 years later. Since then, this tenacious indie has made two more — the poignant girl-and-her-dog story “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) and the subtly trippy wagon-train Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010) — both starring Michelle Williams and both tales of American desperation. In progress: a movie about a cadre of eco-terrorists planning to dynamite a dam.

9. Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh, 48, was the original Sundance kid. His first feature “sex, lies, and videotape” (1989) not only took the festival by storm but went on to win the Palm d’Or at Cannes. Soderbergh has directed Oscar winners (“Erin Brockovich”) and commercial star vehicles (“Ocean’s 11” and its two sequels). But big time success not withstanding, he has proved unexpectedly experimental in his choice of projects, including a remake of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” a four-hour biography of Che Guevera, and a movie created around porn star Sasha Grey. Soderbergh is not so much an old-fashioned auteur as a new-fangled technical virtuoso and a great, brainy problem solver.

10. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the 42-year-old Thai director known to his America friends as Joe, is without doubt the least expected Palm d’Or winner of the 21st Century. Even stranger than the filmmaker’s previous three features, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010) seamlessly and unpretentiously blends the avant-garde film theory Joe absorbed at the Chicago Art Institute with a matter-of-fact Thai animism.