IMDB lists Tarentino’s first film as My Best Friend’s Birthday.
It also lists a couple of films before Citizen Kane for Welles but they were shorts so they presumably don’t count for the purposes of this thread.
John Singleton’s Boys in the Hood.
Boys in the Hood is a definite contender, as is the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society.
Then there’s Bound, and sex lies and videotape, and one of my favorite movies, Strictly Ballroom. All debuts.
The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont. (IMDB credits Darabont with two earlier movies, but one was a short and the other was made for TV, so I say they don’t count.)
Blood Simple, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. (Not their best movie by a long shot, but a very good movie that happened to be its directors’ debut.)
Except that The Shawshank Redeption sucked, and Darabont is a bad director.
“Dances with Wolves” by Kevin Costner
“Big” by Penny Marshall (I believe this was her first directorship (is that a word?)
I’d have to go with Bound. It’s a better movie than The Matrix, (and I love The Matrix).
I think this needs to be more specific. With directors like Spielberg and Lucas, whose student films are now part of the vocabulary of film buffs, and directors like Penny Marshall (whose directorial debut was episodes of Laverne and Shirley and Working Stiffs, and whose feature film directorial debut is Jumping Jack Flash)… it’s hard to tell when they began. Then there are the Coens and the Wachowskis, who probably have had experience before their breakthroughs (school, low budget, etc.) but we only know them for Blood Simple or Bound.
I’m also confused as to what the ‘best’ refers… better than other first films or better than later films by the same director?