Back In Action: Five Movie Directors Making A Welcome Return In 2025

It’s hard to believe now but before taking 12 long years to follow 1987’s Full Metal Jacket with Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, the famously meticulous Stanley Kubrick was comparatively prolific — in the ’60s alone he released four of his 13 features. In these days of instant gratification, a director taking longer than three years is either deemed to be M.I.A. or about to pop up with a secret film made entirely under the radar (“Don’t believe everything you read on the net,” says Nicolas Winding Refn on that score). But absence does make the heart grow fonder, and these five directors can expect a warm welcome in 2025.

KATHRYN BIGELOW
Back with: Untitled. Last film Detroit (2017)

Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2010 when she became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director (she won Best Picture too), but the California director has never been one to court awards. Similarly, her films have tended to steer clear of festival berths; indeed, when The Hurt Locker premiered at Venice (and subsequently TIFF), the film was received poorly in the first reviews, and it took a year for the film to shake off allegations that it was simply a sensationalized Hollywood portrayal of the Iraq War.

Longtime admirers of Bigelow’s, however, immediately saw the film for what it was, an extraordinary and terrifyingly immersive experience that plugged viewers into adrenaline rush of front-line combat. Bigelow frequently checks into all-male environments — starting with her biker-gang movie debut The Loveless in 1981— and presents them with a curious outsider’s eye for detail. Even her female-led movies — Blue Steel and Zero Dark Thirty — present a vision of women in a man’s world, all firmly in the context of stylish genre cinema.

Her latest (so far untitled) film is being released by Netflix, which suggests that she may be coaxed back into the fall festival fray. Assuming real-life events don’t overtake it, the story allegedly takes place in the White House during a missile attack on America and stars Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke.

Back with: One Battle After Another. Last film: Licorice Pizza (2021)

P.T.A., as he is affectionately known, has had a charmed life, awards-wise; ironically, the only time he’s ever struck out was with 2002’s Punch Drunk Love, believed by many to be one of his best movies. That film also marks his only appearance in the Cannes competition, following his debut at the festival, in Un Certain Regard, with Hard Eight (aka Sydney) in 1996. Like Kathryn Bigelow, Anderson doesn’t follow regular festival trends: Perhaps his most famous film, There Will Be Blood, closed Fantastic Fest in 2007, and though The Master competed in Venice, he tends to release his films on the fly.

His latest film, perhaps untitled or perhaps called One Battle After Another, stars Leonardo DiCaprio in a chase comedy inspired in equal parts by Jonathan Demme, a huge inspiration on Anderson’s directing style, and Thomas Pynchon, cult author of source novel for 2014’s Inherent Vice. The casting — which also includes Benicio Del Toro and Regina Hall — will catch the Academy’s eye, but the film also sees Anderson reunited with this regular composer Jonny Greenwood, guitarist/keyboardist with Radiohead and twice Oscar nominated for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Anderson’s Phantom Thread.

PAUL GREENGRASS
Back with: The Lost Bus. Last film: News Of The World (2020)

A former journalist, Paul Greengrass is renowned for bringing a documentarian’s eye to action dramas based on real-life events, a technique he parlayed into great box office success when he turned to fiction with his three of the five Jason Bourne movies starring Matt Damon. After 2020’s Tom Hanks vehicle News of the World, which slipped under most people’s radars despite four Oscar nominations (mostly for tech), Greengrass is returning this year to the kind of film that made his reputation early on (think Bloody Sunday and United 93).

Titled The Lost Bus and based on the 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, it stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera in the true story of a school bus caught up in the catastrophic Camp Fire that swept through California in 2018. Whether this Apple TV+ production will get festival play is anyone’s guess, since Greengrass has done very well so far — with 15 nominations, three wins and only one film so far screened in Cannes.

Back with: Roofman. Last film: The Light Between Oceans (2016)

After the double whammy of Blue Valentine in 2010 and The Place Beyond the Pines in 2012, Derek Cianfrance was creating a real niche for himself as master of understated melodrama. Sadly, the third film after that — an emotional two-hander called The Light Between Oceans with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander — seemed to cut that momentum stone dead, leading to a near 10-year gap between that comes to end this fall with his new film Roofman.

Starring Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, it tells the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, a reserve soldier-turned-robber who broke into more than 60 branches of McDonald’s overnight, then emptied the cash register in the morning after herding their staff into freezers. Cianfrance has mostly made noise on the indie circuit, but his recent Oscar nomination — as a co-writer on Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal — might pique the Academy’s interest. Venice, then TIFF (if not Telluride) would seem to be the place for it to start its journey.

LYNNE RAMSAY
Back with: Die My Love. Last film: You Were Never Really Here (2017)

The south of France must surely be the next stop for Glasgow’s Lynne Ramsay, since the Scottish director is, by now, a Cannes thoroughbred, having debuted all her films in the festival: Ratcatcher in Un Certain Regard, Morvern Caller in Directors’ Fortnight, and both We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here in competition. Ramsay’s style has developed in leaps and bounds over the last 26 years since Ratcatcher, taking her away from her early social-realist works and towards a more visceral, genre-inflected cinema.

Adapted from the 2017 novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love — Ramsay’s first film in eight years after an ill-fated attachment to the 2015 Natalie Portman Western Jane Got a Gun — features the stellar pairing of Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence in the story of a new mother sent into a psychotic spiral by post-natal depression. Ramsay is, like Andrea Arnold, something of a rock star in the British independent scene, but that renown has never translated into Oscar nominations. Given the Cannes Film Festival’s new-found status as a bellwether for the Academy Awards (notably the rapid ascension of The Substance director Coralie Fargeat), this could be the film to break that duck.