AFT Awards: Best Director

This is the twenty-seventh category of the 8th Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order):
52 Tuesdays, A Coffee in Berlin, A Murder in the Park, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, Appropriate Behavior, Begin Again, Big Hero 6, Blind, Brides, Calvary, Camp X-Ray, Chinese Puzzle, Coherence, Difret, Forev, Frank, Freedom Summer, Fury, Human Capital, Infinitely Polar Bear, Joe, Kill the Messenger, Land Ho, Life Itself, Lilting, Listen Up Philip, Manhattan Romance, Metro Manila, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, One Chance, Pride, Rocks in My Pockets, Rudderless, Selma, Song of the Sea, Song One, St. Vincent, Starred Up, Tasting Menu, The Congress, The Double, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Grand Seduction, The Imitation Game, The Lego Movie, The Little Bedroom, The Supreme Price, The Theory of Everything, The Way He Looks, Two Days, One Night, Viva la Liberta, West, Wild, Young Ones, Zero Motivation

Runners-up:
Richard Linklater (Boyhood)
Denis Villeneuve (Enemy)
Darren Paul Fisher (Frequencies)
Steven Knight (Locke)
Kat Candler (Hellion)

The winner:
Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) delivered a vast, endless adventure completely worthy of its title, besting last year’s “Gravity” with another mystifying and enthralling journey into space.

Other nominees:
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Birdman) took a story about show business and made it sparkle with electricity, never missing a beat as its characters became overcome with self-awareness. J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) composed a pensive and lingering look at success in the early 1980s for one would-be mobster and his failing enterprise. Jim Mickle (Cold in July) guided a dark, brutal story from a fierce start to an even more violent finale, not letting up on the intensity all the way through. Ned Benson (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby) crafted a story composed of two concurrent stories about loss and loneliness, in no rush to get anywhere and fully committed to its characters and their lives.