International Breakouts of the Year: ‘Anora’ and ‘Emilia Perez’ Stars, ‘The Substance’ Director and More Had a Career-Changing 2024

variety.com:

Variety‘s crop of international breakouts — actors and filmmakers — includes the creator and stars of one of the most talked about TV shows of the year (and one which could leave Netflix with a tasty legal bill), the writer/director of a wild body-horror that took Cannes by storm and could give a beloved star her first brush with the Oscars and a first-time feature director who enjoyed a record-breaking opening weekend at the box office.

See the list of 12 (well, 11, but you’ll see) international breakouts of the year below. Young Italian director Maura Delpero came out of relative obscurity to become Europe’s new indie darling after her sophomore film “Vermiglio” scored the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion and was picked over Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” to became Italy’s – now shortlisted – International Oscars contender. “Vermiglio” is set at the end of World War II in an Alpine village where the arrival of a soldier causes disruption in the dynamics between three sisters.

Delpero’s drama was praised as “quietly breathtaking” by Variety critic Jessica Kiang, who noted that the film “unfolds from tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow, into a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps.” Mikey Madison may have been getting much of the performance applause for her lead turn as a sex worker in Sean Baker’s Cannes-winning Oscar hopeful “Anora,” but the strip club rom-com has also lit some fuel under the careers of her two Russian co-stars.

Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays Madison’s wild, son-of-a-billionaire-oligarch love interest, and Yura Borisov, who plays the more calming henchman-with-a-heart, were both already in-demand rising stars on home soil.