Eric Lavallée

Among the several contemporary indie vampire flicks in this top 100 list (more to come in 2013 with Jim Jarmusch interested in the genre), it is this coming-of-ager that we feel holds the most promise as the form, from the book description, is reminiscent of some of those plot-twisting Spanish thriller titles. The Killer FIlms folks usually don't do horror but instead the human condition, and that the one helming the pic is Stephanie Daley's Brougher - who gave us a strong, underappreciated directing debut which did feature some rather strong female performances means that with a better production value we see this female filmmaker making huge strides.

Look no further than this Hungarian-German co-production for perhaps the under the radar acting performance of 2012. It could back to back years where the relationship with maid turns out to be material worth exploring (Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena was gold) as veteran Oscar-winning Hungarian director István Szabó managed to lasso Helen Mirren in what will be known as her most unglamorous role to date.

Howl saw Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman experimented with the biopic form and they came up with some surprising innovative results -- we're expecting some more of the same with the Linda Lovelace twin life stories. Massive casting round-up is impressive, and they got James Franco on board again, moving from his stint as Allen Ginsberg to the Playboy inventor. This is the first one out of the gate for the competing Lovelace biopics.

A project we've been keeping track of the moment it was mentioned as part of the Sundance labs, two hip and gifted New York based filmmakers putting their powers together in what should be a dialogue rich, fragile and vulnerable friendly kind of love story. Ry Russo-Young's You Wont Miss Me is best describe as an honest portrait with a melange of styles and we look forward in seeing how the selected actors (Olivia Thirlby, Dylan McDermott, John Krasinski) deal with the material.

Their 2006 breakout audience pleasing Little Miss Sunshine probably brought a truckload of directing offers for the team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, but in the end, they opted for actress Zoe Kazan's screenwriting debut which says plenty about the material at hand (or perhaps their rapport with LMS' Paul Dano). The Searchlight project managed to attract a diverse set of supporting actors and with Dano in the lead this might be a sophomore project worth keeping tabs on.