Foxcatcher
Director: Bennett Miller
Screenwriters: E. Max Frye, Dan Futterman
Cast: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
Sony Pictures Classics
Rated R | 134 Minutes
Release Date: December 19, 2014

“Some rich guy calls you on the phone, ‘I want Mark Schultz to come visit me.’ Well, I’m a – I’m a wrestling coach. And I have a deep love for the sport of wrestling. And I wanted to speak with you about your future, about what you hope to achieve. What do you hope to achieve, Mark?”

Directed by Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Foxcatcher is the story of Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and paranoid-schizophrenic millionaire coach John du Pont (Steve Carell), who murdered Schultz’s brother, Olympic Champion Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), in 1996.

In 1984, both Mark and Dave Schultz won Olympic Gold in wrestling events. After the ’84 Olympics, Mark began training for the ’88 Olympics in Seoul with little support. Being a wrestling enthusiast, du Pont invited the struggling athlete to his lavish estate, where Mark would live in order to train full-time.

Coming off the great critical, albeit middling box office, success of his latest film, Moneyball, director Bennett Miller has lined up an interesting team for his next film, Foxcatcher.

Already to star Steve Carell, 24 Frames is reporting that Channing Tatum has joined the film’s cast.

Before we start, a couple of rules that I followed while making this list:

-Documentaries don’t count: Watching the scene and setting the scene are two different things. If you made a documentary before you made your dramatic debut, the dramatic debut is the one I’m counting.

-Your movie had to be distributed: Every once in a while, a feature makes the film festival rounds without actually getting picked up and distributed. If your second film was released in theaters in America, that’s the one I’m counting.

-No Donnie Darko: That movie is actually an episode of Quantum Leap with shitty emo “Kill Yourself” music packed in. Sorry, kids.

So now then… The Ten Best Directorial Debuts of the Decade