Eric Lavallée

It's been a decade since Rape Me, the road-trip fueled with sex and violence which stirred up controversy on at least one side of the Atlantic (it was pulled after one week in the U.S), but the reason why we're curious about this specimen hasn't got much to do with the skills Virginie Despentes displayed with her off-putting directing debut, but rather how she'll translate characters that were first introduced in her book back in 2004 with a pairing that includes Béatrice Dalle and Emmanuelle Béart.

Short film filmmaker and installation work artist Liza Johnson is among of the folks that we included in our inaugural American New Wave 25 series, and we're expecting a breath of fresh air in the subject matter she examines in her feature debut. In cinema, post-traumatic stress disorder following war traumas has been done to death, but I'm betting this discourse might have a little more to offer than previous viewpoints -- the small town template includes a shifting of the family paradigm and if the perf is well-calibrated then I think we might see Scooby Doo thesp Linda Cardellini's name mentioned during awards season same time next year.

I bet you this is the only "thesis" film in the Top 100 list. Among Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film people of 2010, the first of several first-time filmmakers on our list, Julius Onah' debut is backed by executive producer Spike Lee and comes carrying an eclectic combination of young players in Columbus Short, Wilmer Valderrama and Alicja Bachleda.

I wouldn't be surprised if Kahn's last two films draw blanks for U.S cinephiles -- as both L'avion (2005) and Les regrets (2009) failed to be picked up for distribution. The French are specialists in relationship dramas of the draining realistic kind, and in many ways Kahn has a knack for memorable opposite sex matched screen pairings such as Roberto Succo and 2004 film Red Lights - one of my favorite films of the 00's. I'm liking the idea of what the pairing of Guillaume Canet and Leila Bekhti could potentially bring to the big screen.

The 2008 Black List favorite from which this is based on is actually a pretty solid read and it's got some wacky characters all the way down to trio of kids that are being babysat. Sam Rockwell who worked with DGG on Snow Angels gets teamed here with Jonah Hill whose stock went up in my books with Cyrus..and we'll probably think even highly of the actor with the release of Moneyball in September. With an Adventures in Babysitting on crack formula, this should pay better dividends than his stoner comedy of 2008.