7 Up-And-Coming Directors Attached To Huge Hollywood Movies

5. Matt Reeves

What Put Him On The Map: 2008's Cloverfield What He's On Now: 2014's Dawn of The Planet of The Apes For me, Cloverfield is a movie that really has no right being as good as it is. It's a pretty typical shaky-cam found footage monster movie whose viral marketing campaign employed all of producer J.J. Abrams' usual Lost-ian "mystery box" techniques - techniques that, by the time I had gotten around to seeing the film in 2012, had already become quite ham-fisted. All that said, some really solid performances (including the gumpy loveliness of T.J Miller as the man behind the camera) and some great creature work by Tippett Studios and talented VFX house Double Negative make Cloverfield a really satisfying movie experience. The same could be said of Dawn of The Planet of The Apes' predecessor, 2011's equally-prepositionally-titled Rise of The Planet of The Apes. Being a big fan of the original Apes and not such a fan of tiresome Hollywood do-overs (are we sensing a theme here?) I have not yet watched Rise, but by most accounts it's a delightfully well-done summer blockbuster. I look forward to catching up with it, and I'm excited to see what Reeves does with the hotly-anticipated sequel, which has already dropped a riveting first trailer.