Better Luck Tomorrow: Paramount Pictures

Lin is the most successful Asian-American director working today. The Taiwanese-American filmmaker is responsible for saving the Fast and the Furious films from the direct-to-DVD dustheap and transforming them into the monster skyscraper-hopping franchise it is today. He has now moved on to the rebooted Star Trek movies, having been passed the reins by J.J. Abrams for Star Trek Beyond. But before he headed into the realm of big-studio series, Lin exploded onto the scene with Better Luck Tomorrow, a 2002 film about the escalating misdeeds of a group of bored, Asian-American overachievers that was acquired by MTV Films and that seemed to herald a new age of Asian-American cinema that never materialized. In between larger movies, Lin did make Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee, a mockumentary about the search for a Bruce Lee double after the martial arts legend died during the filming of his last feature. He was also one of the founders of the (now defunct?) Asian-American YouTube channel YOMYOMF.

Where to start: Better Luck Tomorrow didn't just aim to explode model minority myths, it also makes a compelling case for the talents of its roster of Asian-American actors — like John Cho, who played the smug rich kid romantic rival to one of the main characters, or Sung Kang, whom Lin would introduce as a stealth Asian lead in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and who'd become the coolest character in the franchise. Kang's character even has the same name as his Better Luck Tomorrow one — Han, suggesting that it's all a Better Luck Tomorrow shared cinematic universe, and we're just living in it.