Given that she acts exclusively in independent pictures largely produced on shoestring budgets, it wouldn’t quite be accurate to describe Kate Lyn Sheil as a movie star. But if you’re even remotely attuned to the landscape of contemporary indie filmmaking, Sheil’s presence seems ubiquitous: over the last three-plus years she’s appeared, always memorably, in nearly two dozen shorts and features, with another eight wrapped up and currently in post-production (one of which is the project that may prove to be her breakout, a new series developed by Alex Ross Perry for HBO called “The Traditions”). Much in the way that a pre-fame Greta Gerwig became informally known as the face of mumblecore in the mid-2000s, Sheil has come to be associated with a particular subset of the New York indie film world, a loose circle of friends and colleagues clustered around NYU and Kim’s Video, where she briefly worked with Perry back in 2005.

Though hardly a coherent movement—at least until it earns its own subgenre tag—the group to which Sheil more or less belongs has emerged over the last few years as a kind of modern New York nouvelle vague, where amateur actors and directors alike continue to work on one another’s projects. The cross-pollination of the scene yields work that seems in constant conversation with itself, each authorial voice challenging or helping amplify the next, the group in general better off together than alone. Sheil’s part in all of this is to ground the work in something real: her acting talent, which among her contemporaries is peerless, lends every film she’s in an instant sense of gravity and professionalism. Having esteemed directors as friends has certainly been a boon to Sheil’s career—her roles have thus far been secured by acquaintance and recommendation—but it’s a credit to her abilities that she has offered at least as much to the filmmakers with whom she’s worked than they have offered her or her career.

Sheil has already appeared in small roles in two well-regarded films this year—Bob Byington’s “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and Dan Sallitt’s superb “The Unspeakable Act”—and, true to form, she will be featured in at least a half-dozen films due to open through the rest of the year. This past weekend saw the release of one of her best performances to date, in Amy Seimetz’s excellent “Sun Don’t Shine”, a film which pushes the already great actor well outside the comfort zone established by her earlier work. And it seems to confirm what many already suspected: Kate Lyn Sheil is perhaps the best actor of her generation.

Also check out: Our interview with "Sun Don't Shine" filmmaker, Amy Seimetz

The following are five films which, though not necessarily her best films, show the range of her abilities as a performer.

"IMPOLEX"

Alex Ross Perry is one of the most important young filmmakers working today. His heady, hilarious, and deeply strange debut—an oblique adaptation of “Gravity’s Rainbow”, truer to the tenor of Pynchon’s prose than to the story he tells—seems to wander aimlessly for more than an hour before stumbling upon a scene of laser-sharp focus. It’s a sequence of deceptive simplicity: Tyrone (Riley O’Bryan) and Katie (Sheil) sit on a log in the woods and talk in a medium two-shot about the halcyon days of their relationship. But by the time Perry has cut to Sheil’s face, held in an almost classical Hollywood close-up, what started as a dry conversation in a principally comic film has mutated into something considerably darker and more real. Sheil, here making her feature film debut, is nothing short of revelatory: her pained monologue about waiting up all night for Tyrone to come home from the movies has a quiet, startling intensity, singlehandedly making the film’s one explicitly dramatic moment convincingly moving.

"GREEN"

With strong roles in both Alex Karpovsky’s recent “Supporting Characters” and Joe Swanberg’s forthcoming “All the Light in the Sky”, Sophia Takal seems on the verge of breaking out as an accomplished indie actor. But last year’s “Green”, her regrettably underseen directorial debut, suggests that her real talent lies behind the camera: the film finds her directing Sheil, herself, and her boyfriend Lawrence Levine in a slow-burn autocritique about her own anger and jealousy, one of the most striking debut films in recent memory. Sheil plays Genevieve, the lead, an intellectual spending the summer house-sitting a cottage with her boyfriend, Sebastian. When a local girl (played by Takal herself) catches Sebastian’s eye, Sheil begins a long, weary descent from suspicion to spite, her performance by the end becoming a tightrope-walk of barely restrained rage.

"AUTOEROTIC"

This four-part omnibus comedy—featuring nearly every member of the New York scene, from Ti West to Frank V Ross—is pretty hit or miss, but the one unreservedly great sequence stars a Sheil as a burgeoning sex addict with a predilection for asphyxiation. It’s a role the typically reserved Sheil embraces with total earnestness and candor, and it’s one she elevates, as expected, from merely a high-concept comic trifle into something much more nuanced and dramatically intriguing.

"THE COMEDY"

Rick Alverson’s seethingly angry film about hipster privilege and entitlement is much smarter and more perceptive about its subject than its detractors have given it credit for. Sheil plays an unnamed waitress with little screentime, but she serves an important purpose: her presence, as a temporary object of attraction for the ever-disengaged Swanson (Tim Heidecker), casts the repugnancy of its lead in stark relief, her passivity both distressing and oddly affecting. Her strange, astonishing scene, which begins with the prospect of sex, culminates in her sudden, unexplained seizure, which Swanson simply observes without care or any effort to help.

"SUN DON'T SHINE"

Amy Seimetz, whose lead performance in Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” has been very warmly received, has another opportunity to impress this month with the release of “Sun Don’t Shine”, her first feature film. Sheil stars alongside long-time colleague Kentucker Audley as Crystal, one half of a romantic duo stuck finishing up the final stages of a badly planned murder. Seimetz has said the part was written with Sheil in mind, but if that’s true it was clearly written against type: the anxious, stuttering, and increasingly deranged Crystal is a far cry from the more timid and sedate roles to which Sheil is accustomed, forcing her to stray way out beyond her typical range. The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, will no doubt seem more effective to audiences already familiar with her work elsewhere, as part of the fun of seeing the character explode on screen is recognizing the degree to which Sheil is transforming with her.