Filmography: The Squid and the Whale (2005); Margot at the Wedding (2007); Greenberg (2010); Frances Ha (2012) While Noah Baumbach has yet to garner the sort of universal praise around any one of his films that the previous directors' on this list have for their films, Baumbach has nevertheless managed to build a significant fanbase. The sometimes writing partner of director Wes Anderson made his first directorial foray into the new millennium with the excellent The Squid and the Whale. Starring a very young Jesse Eisenberg, the semi-biographical story about an emotionally troubled family in New York City gave Baumbach his lone Oscar nomination for writing the film's script. While his follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, didn't spark too many fires, his partnering with Ben Stiller for the film Greenberg, about a malcontent who returns to Los Angeles in order to house sit for his brother, earned a number of good notices. It was Baumbach's next film though, Frances Ha, that really lit passions for Baumbach's particular style of filmmaking. Shot in beautiful black-and-white, Frances Ha detailed the misadventures of a young twenty-something woman adrift in New York. A zeitgeist film that still managed to pay tribute to influences such as Woody Allen and François Truffaut, the film captured the awkward temporal stasis of the Millennial generation. Frances Ha appeared on a number of critics top ten lists, including the illustrious Sight and Sound top ten, but failed to catch on beyond the hardcore cinephile crowd. Despite making a number of impressive films, in some ways, Baumbach still feels like cinema's best kept secret. Hopefully, this will change soon.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
