Each year, the Guardian does its bit to contribute to the annual hysteria that is the movie awards season; though ours steers clear of glitzy dance routines, on-camera meltdowns and off-colour jokes about interpersonal relationships.
The Guardian first film award is designed to reward debut directors whose films went on release during 2012 in UK cinemas (festival screenings don't count), and the rollcall of previous winners comprises Joanna Hogg's Unrelated, Gideon Koppel's Sleep Furiously, Clio Barnard's The Arbor and, last year, The Guard, directed by John Michael McDonagh. There may have been a preponderance of British films there, but Britishness is certainly not a requirement: we are looking for ambition of theme, originality of vision, and proficiency of achievement. In other words, they've got to be good, but we like a scrapper too.
This year's 10-strong shortlist was voted on by a panel of Guardian film writers and critics; you'll find them below, in alphabetical order. A winner will be declared later this month, after consideration of another panel led by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw. Meanwhile, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
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What we said: "Benh Zeitlin's debut feature is part film, part hallucination: a ripe and gamey piece of what you might call Apocalyptic Southern Gothic, ambitious and flawed but sprinting with energy. It's set at the time of the Katrina catastrophe – though it could as well be happening hundreds of years in the future, when much-prophesied climate calamities have come to pass … Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11." Peter Bradshaw
Bombay Beach
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What we said: "An eerily compelling documentary about lost souls in a lost place... a rich slice of Americana, and there's a great soundtrack from musicians including Bob Dylan." PB
The Cabin in the Woods
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What we said: "No matter how cynical and wised-up everyone is about the horror film and all its various tropes, the genre triumphantly survives, to a great extent by playfully absorbing that cynicism and feeding it back to the fanbase. Drew Goddard plays on this postmodern connoisseurship in this meta-chiller, The Cabin in the Woods, co-written with Joss Whedon … It's an affectionately satirical nightmare that asks why horror is so potent: what awful human need is being fed by seeing attractive young people in states of semi-undress who are suddenly, brutally slaughtered, almost as if they are being punished for being young and sexy?" PB
The Imposter
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What we said: "Bart Layton's documentary is about one of the most extraordinary sociopath-conmen of modern times: Frédéric Bourdin, a young Frenchman who in the late 1990s appeared to have all America fooled – the press, the police, everyone. This film is as gripping as any white-knuckle thriller: it is one of the year's best. And what a finale." PB
Margin Call
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What we said: "The confident cinematic debut of writer-director JC Chandor, an experienced maker of commercials, Margin Call is the best fictional treatment of the current economic crisis. It's altogether superior to Oliver Stone's hollow Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and in the same class as Charles Ferguson's revealing, piercingly intelligent documentary Inside Job." Philip French
Martha Marcy May Marlene
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What we said: "This is a disquieting and ambiguous movie in a classic US indie style. It may not be entirely perfect – I sat down to it twice before fully hearing its insistent, sinister whisper – but there's an unsettling darkness in the deep green, sun-dappled shade of its woodland locations." PB
My Brother the Devil
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What we said: "First-time feature director Sally El Hosaini makes a bold and terrifically confident debut, hitting her stride with this urban drama set in east London. It's well made, well acted by a largely non-professional cast and seductively photographed … a muscular and heartfelt film with Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette somewhere in its DNA." PB
Searching for Sugar Man
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What we said: "There is something fascinating in the reclusive rock star who vanishes. In real life, it is Syd Barrett or Peter Green, in fiction, Bucky Wunderlick in Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street, or Richard Katz in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. But none of these examples exactly matches the extraordinary case of Rodriguez … Searching for Sugar Man is an interesting footnote to a species of secret or denied cultural history: the history of South Africa's white liberal classes, the fabric of whose lives may be overlooked by social historians." PB
Ted
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What we said: "Seth MacFarlane, the creator of TV's Family Guy, has co-written and directed a stoner fantasy comedy which is cynical and lethargic, sour and dour; it is misanthropic, crass, facetious, offensive, immature and very funny … compared to The Beaver starring Mel Gibson, the tale of a menopausal executive who speaks to a hand puppet, Ted is a watercolour exercise in whimsical charm." PB
Wild Bill
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What we said: "Dexter Fletcher, former child star, graduate of Anna Scher's formidable drama school and veteran of numerous British and American action films, makes a creditable debut as director and co-author of this conventional British crime movie. He injects new marrow into some creaky bones." PF
