In light of thinking about Zoë Kravitz’s extraordinary directorial debut, Blink Twice, we noticed that there’s a secret history of female actors who have taken up the mantle of director that stretches back to the medium’s formative days. This is not a qualitative survey, more a potted history of female screen performers who have been able shift to the other side of the camera, and hopefully these 50 capsule reviews, when taken together, gives a sense of the sweep, the evolving styles and the eventual surfeit of opportunity in an industry that, for its first century, seemed to frame directing as a male-only sport. Please note: in the instances we detail below, we do not see the move from actor to director as being hierarchical in any way – they are two distinct roles which require a unique set of physical and emotional tools to do them well.
1. Assunta Spina (1915)
Directed by Francesca Bertini
There are film historians who claim that this Italian melodrama from 1915, co-directed by Gustavo Serena and silent era diva, Francesca Bertini, offers the blueprint for a mode of filmmaking later referred to as neorealism. And it’s easy to see why. It is the story of jealousy, male rage and rigid conservatism in the streets of Napoli, as the lustrous heroine of the tile (played by Bertini) has her face slashed with a knife by her husband when she dares to dance with the local fishmonger at a wedding party. The first half of the film details Assunta’s flighty whims and feminine charms, not so much a femme fatale as a liberated woman during a time and in a place where such freedoms were frowned upon. The second half moves into the courtroom, and the shock revelation that Assunta choses to defend the actions of her barbarous beau, much to the consternation of her friends and family. And yes, the kernel of neorealism is there to see, in its raw depiction of the political degradations of the era. David Jenkins
2. The Dream Lady (1918)
Directed by Alice Guy/Elsie Jane Wilson
One of the surest ways to direct a movie as a woman in early Hollywood was to work with your husband – such married duos included Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, Helen Holmes and JP McGowan, and Elsie Jane Wilson and Rupert Julian. That final pairing set sail for the United States from Australia after years of acting, landing in Hollywood in 1914. After starring in films alongside Lon Chaney, Wilson was called upon by Universal Pictures to direct several “women’s pictures”, often centring on children. Her surviving feature, The Dream Lady (1918), is much more intriguing than such dismissive branding suggests. It fits into a curious category of gender-play movies made in Hollywood in the early silent era, with the title character played by Carmel Myers granting a young woman’s wish to become male, with bisexual romantic antics ensuing. A great shame then that Wilson’s film career came to an abrupt end shortly after. Lillian Crawford
3. The Girl in Tails (1926)
Directed by Karin Swanström
The Girl in Tails is one of two surviving films (from a total of four) directed by actress and longtime thespian Karin Swanström, and it’s for that reason that her name is not so well known when it comes to the classic era of Swedish cinema. Swanström’s name is etched into the annals of film history for being the person who discovered Ingrid Bergman while working as a studio talent scout. Yet this film demonstrates an easy knack for comic levity and spry social satire, as it follows young Katja (Magda Holm) as she heads to her examination ball in a man’s coat and tails because her widower father refuses to shell out for a dress. In her new gender-twisting guise, she smokes cigars and quaffs whiskey, and generally socks it to the conservative hoi poloi. DJ
4. The Red Meadows (1945)
Directed by Bödil Ipsen, Lau Lauritzen Jr.
This flinty document of wartime derring-do netted the Palme d’Or for its makers in 1945, and it’s not difficult to see why. Directed by Bödil Ipsen, who had acted through much of the silent era, The Red Meadows trains its focus on double- hard Danish resistance fighter Michael (Poul Reichhardt) who undertakes a grandiose factory bombing during the Nazi occupation despite believing that there’s a traitor in the midst of his close-knit crew. Ibsen and co-director Lau Lauritzen Jr bring a feeling of luxe Hollywood craftsmanship to a hard-nosed thriller with a genuinely complex moral core. Ipsen kept directing into the early 1950s, before she capped off her career by returning to acting, receiving a Bodil Award for her turn as a grandma in Eric Balling’s Faith, Hope and Witchcraft from 1960. DJ
5. Death is a Caress (1949)
Directed by Edith Calmar
Norway’s answer to Ingmar Bergman was a woman; Edith Carlmar to be exact. Though she worked more regularly as an actor, her 10-year directorial career proffered a bounty of exciting and passionate works which merged Hollywood standards such as noir and melodrama with a more solemn, Scandinavian sense of depressive fatalism. Her debut feature, Death is a Caress from 1949, suggests itself as a classic tale of murder, dames, liquor and hard love. Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen) swings her car into a local mechanics, only to have one of the more dashing grease monkeys, Eric (Claus Wiese), throw aside his whale sausage (!) and go in for the romantic kill. Yet this is a flashback, as the film’s opening scene sees Eric confessing to the murder of his wife. It’s an emotionally tortuous ride, with the pair falling in and out of love with one another depending on where they are, what they’re doing and how much they’ve drunk. DJ
6. The Bigamist (1953)
Directed by Ida Lupino
If there was a Mount Rushmore of female Hollywood filmmakers, Ida Lupino would be the first face carved on it. While better known in her day as an actor, Lupino’s crowning achievements – for which she remains criminally overlooked – came behind the camera. In the early 1950s, she helmed a string of pictures for RKO including the socially conscious noir, Outrage, and the tennis romance, Hard, Fast and Beautiful! (the OG Challengers!). After parting ways with RKO, Lupino and then-husband Collier Young went fully independent, self-financing and distributing The Bigamist at great personal expense. Creatively speaking, it was worth it. This stylish, superbly acted film follows Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien), a travelling salesman constantly yo-yoing between two wives (played by Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself ). Harry’s double life quickly unravels after an adoption agency looks into his background, with Lupino treating this morally complex taboo subject with great empathy and emotional intelligence. Adam Woodward
7. Forever a Woman (1955)
Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka
Kinuyo Tanaka is one of Japan’s defining screen icons. Among the most popular stars of pre-war Japanese films, she continued to have a prolific acting career in the post-war landscape, working with such directing titans as Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. In 1953, Tanaka became the second Japanese woman to direct a feature, after Tazuko Sakane. Each broadly concerned with different notions of femininity, her six films as director include some of the most exquisite dramas of Japanese cinema’s history. Forever a Woman – also known as The Eternal Breasts – may be her masterpiece. Written by outspoken feminist Sumie Tanaka, the film adapts the biography of poet Fumiko Nakajō, who died young of breast cancer. Offering a daring depiction of female desire enduring in defiance of societal expectations, this is a deeply moving story of securing self-expression and autonomy in spite of all manner of hardships. Josh Slater-Williams
8. El Camino (1964)
Directed by Ana Mariscal
A glamorous screen icon of General Franco’s Spain, Ana Mariscal was a mainstay of local cinema screens during the 1940s. That is until 1953 when she suddenly tried her hand at writing, producing and directing, along with acting, in her debut feature, the rip-roaring Segundo López, Urban Adventurer. She remained primarily an actor while occasionally crossing over to the dark side, and her best film arrived in 1964 called El Camino, telling of a young country boy and the hijinx that he and his friends get up to ahead of his departure to the city for more scholarly pursuits. Though the film and Mariscal’s work in general are little-known outside of her home country, El Camino was recently the subject of a new restoration which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. DJ
9. The Girls (1968)
Directed by Mai Zetterling
Mai Zetterling should be more famous outside of her native Sweden than she currently is. The tide may be turning, however, as in a bizarre algorithmic anomaly, her astonishing 1968 film The Girls (among many other canonical classics of Swedish cinema not directed by Ingmar Bergman) can be found languishing in their own digital cul-de-sac on Netflix of all places. She was a child star with her career kick-started by an iconic role in Bergman’s 1944 film Torment. 20 years and countless roles later, she made the hard transition to directing and gave up her work in front of the camera. Following her erotic cause celebre, Loving Couples, which blazed an early trail for screen nudity, she returned with her wild feminist masterpiece, The Girls, in which the all-female cast of a production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata must contend with the domestic expectations that come as part and parcel of the gender. DJ
10. Wanda (1970)
Directed by Barbara Loden
According to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, Barbara Loden’s sole directorial effort, Wanda, is more beloved than anything made by her more famous husband, Elia Kazan, none of whose work managed to place within the top 250. She came up as a theatre actress, and worked in various supporting roles for film and TV, most notably her turn as the chaotic lush Ginny in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass. For many decades, Wanda was the small indie film that nobody loved – so much so that its original negative was neatly thrown out as trash before some plucky restoration experts saved it. The film sees Loden playing a discombobulated, down-and-out nomad who abandons her child and hits the road. Instead, she finds winos, abusers and petty criminals who use her as they would a soiled rag. Its dismal subject matter belies a core of transcendent truth about what it really means to be a woman. DJ
11. A New Leaf (1971)
Directed by Elaine May
There’s a very fine new biography of Elaine May on the shelves now called ’Miss May Does Not Exist’ by Carrie Courogen which details the grand sweep of her turbulent career in much more detail that we have space for here. Rather than film acting, Ms May earned her spurs in the field of improvisational comedy (head to page 74 for more details on that), and she soon went on to direct and star in the macabre, self-lacerating comedy, A New Leaf, alongside Water Matthau. The question one might ask of this film is not whether it is one of the funniest debut films of all time, but whether it’s one of the funniest screen comedies period, as the action details one man’s sordid quest to murder his wife for money. In this instance it’s the criminally-shy (and fabulously wealthy) botanist Henrietta Lowell (May). The set-up may be simple, but every frame is wrung dry for comic nuance. DJ
12. 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)
Directed by Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen was credited with redefining Bengali cinema in 1981 with the release of her devastating melodrama about the crushing loneliness and fading spirit of an Anglo- Indian teacher played by Jennifer Kendall. An actress who began her career in Satyajit Ray’s anthology film Three Daughters, and worked with him on three further films, went on to create cinema full of similar social commentary on contemporary India. Her father was filmmaker and critic Chidananda Das Gupta who, along with Ray, founded the Calcutta Film Society. She first decided to turn to writing and directing when sitting bored in her dressing room on the set of a mainstream Bombay film and working in the kind of cinema she “did not believe in.” 36 Chowringhee Lane works on multiple levels in its themes of exclusion, solitude and the place of the Anglo-Indian in society while also being exquisitely crafted, especially the haunting Bergmanesque nightmare sequence. Kat McLaughlin
13. Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1981)
Directed by Delphine Seyrig
Several years before the “Bechdel Test” – wherein two female characters must talk about anything other than a man – appeared, Delphine Seyrig posed a similar question to a group of 22 actresses. Among them were Jenny Agutter, Jane Fonda, Maria Schneider, Shirley MacLaine, and other stars from Hollywood and Europe, none of whom could say that they had ever played a woman who had a warm relationship with another woman. Seyrig herself traversed both sides of the Atlantic in her acting career, coming to prominence in 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad, and became energised by parts in films directed by women, including Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. Seyrig ’s brief directorial turn was more radical, more cinéma vérité in style, forming the collective Les Insoumuses in 1975 with Carole Roussopoulos and Iona Wieder to tear down patriarchal cinema. Be Pretty and Shut Up! is the masterpiece of that period, giving voice to the real women behind the fake ones. LC
14. Yentl 1983
Directed by Barbra Streisand
This one’s a bit of a cheat, as Streisand obviously made the lion share of her scratch from her work as a beloved musical artist. But, like many in that game, the siren call of cinema was too much to resist, and she built up a rather tasty acting portfolio in the sixties, with films like Funny Girl, What’s Up, Doc? and mega weepie, The Way We Were. Her 1983 directorial debut, Yentl, remains a staggering achievement, not merely for her central dual performance as a cross- dressing waif attempting to climb the all-male rungs of the local rabbinical school, but down to the incredible assurance of her direction and the film’s immersive period production design. It’s a film which allows Streisand to trade punches with the best prestige talent of the 1980s, and she went on to become the first woman to win a Best Director gong at the Golden Globe Awards. DJ
15. Ratboy (1986)
Directed by Sondra Locke
It is one of the great sorrows in the history of cinema that Sondra Locke’s life and career have become so inextricably tangled with the one of Clint Eastwood, her co-star in classics such as Bronco Billy and The Outlaw Josey Wales and the man with whom she shared a notoriously toxic relationship. After long wanting to direct, Locke finally got her chance with Ratboy, produced by Eastwood and telling the story of a, well, rat boy. A commercial and critical fiasco, this eccentric love story between an unusual boy and an older woman who explores him for financial gain found its rightful place within the generous bosom of cult cinephilia over time. It is strange and whimsical and often incoherent but a blast nonetheless and, in a painfully ironic twist, now stands as a reminder of what could have been had Locke not bumped into a few rats of her own. Rafa Sales Ross
16. Down and Out in America (1986)
Directed by Lee Grant
Three years before Michael Moore coined the blockbuster documentary with Roger & Me, classic-era actress Lee Grant took her own stinging sideswipe at the scourge of Reaganomics with her devastating, hour-long reportage piece, Down and Out in America. Grant speaks to independent farmers being stiffed and left destitute by local banks in Minnesota; the denizens of a parking lot shanty town in Los Angeles; and a desperate family who have been corralled into a festering helltrap known as a “welfare hotel” in New York. Grant was probably best known as one of the mainstays of the iconic soap opera Peyton Place, but is known now primarily for her documentary work, which was placed on a pedestal early in the Covid pandemic when she became one of the first subjects to receive an online retrospective which included all-new restorations of her vital work. DJ
17. Stripped to Kill (1987)
Directed by Katt Shea
Katt Shea was cast in a fair share of tawdry exploitation flicks throughout her acting career, racking up small roles in classics such as Scarface, Barbarian Queen and Psycho III, where she ended up meeting B-movie stalwart Roger Corman. With aspirations to one day make her own films, Shea presented Corman with the premise that would launch her directorial career: a sleazy slasher set largely in a strip club. A detective (Kay Lenz) goes undercover as a stripper in order to find the killer, all while the bodies continue to pile up. The result was 1987’s Stripped to Kill, an entertaining, straight to video sexploitation flick that announced Shea as someone who can confidently navigate her way around the stylish yet trashy genre film. Shea is also clearly well-intentioned in the way she depicts the strippers as people with lives and personalities, treating the artistry behind their routines with the sense of spectacle that slashers more commonly tend to lend to their kills. Marina Ashioti
18. Little Man Tate (1991)
Directed by Jodie Foster
The year 1991 was something of an annus mirabilis for Jodie Foster. February saw the release of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, the film that would earn Foster her second Oscar and for which she is probably still best known. Six months later, she rolled out with her directorial debut, Little Man Tate, the story of a boy genius who struggles under the weight of his intellectual burden. Being a former child star herself, it’s not hard to see why Scott Frank’s screenplay appealed to Foster – and in playing the title character’s hard- working single parent, she delivers one of the most sensitive and moving performances of her career. Foster returned to the big chair four years later for the frothy Thanksgiving family comedy Home for the Holidays, since then has continued to dabble behind the camera (The Beaver, Money Monster). “This is not a business that is kind to women, but it needs them,” she told TIME in 1991. Truer words have rarely been spoken. AW
19. Unstrung Heroes (1995)
Directed by Diane Keaton
Diane Keaton famously made the decision to prevent being typecast as a lovable ditz following her Oscar win for Annie Hall by starring in more “adult-oriented” films such as Looking for Mr Goodbar and Interiors. Her sporadic side hustle as a director, which began in 1995 with the winsome Unstrung Heroes, suggested that she was done with the darkness, as the film offers a rose-tinted rendering of Franz Lidz’ bestselling memoir which detailed his youthful interactions with two eccentric uncles. Keaton takes a leaf out of the Woody Allen book of period recreation, offering a larger-than-life, Rockwell-esque depiction of working-middle class life 1960s Los Angeles. It’s a film of comic platitudes and goofy set-pieces, with Seinfeld star Michael Richards as the dangerously impulsive MVP, playing paranoiac extrovert, Danny. Prior to this feature, Keaton had earned her spurs directing music videos, various episodes of Twin Peaks season two, and even a 1987 documentary on the concept of the afterlife (entitled Heaven). Yet any and all eccentricity had been watered down by the time of the charming but eminently forgettable Unstrung Heroes. DJ
20. Private Parts (1997)
Directed by Betty Thomas
A member of The Second City improv troupe (alongside Bill Murray), Betty Thomas’ screen breakthrough came via drama rather than comedy. A main cast member on influential police procedural Hill Street Blues (1981-87), Thomas won an Emmy and received six further nominations for best supporting actress across the show’s run. She practically retired from acting after the series ended, switching to directing TV and then movies. Mostly directing comedies, her filmography includes several modern updates of pre-existing properties, such as The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and Doctor Dolittle (1998). Her most stylistically bold movie is Private Parts (1997), a comic biopic of controversial media personality Howard Stern, in which Stern plays himself, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall. Profoundly unfunny, the film nonetheless endures as a fascinating cultural artefact concerning a mainstream hit stemming from a shock jock’s self-mythologising. JSW
21. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998)
Directed by Joan Chen
Like many, I personally discovered Joan Chen’s directorial debut through Jamie Stewart, who, tonally influenced by the film’s emotionally distressing core, named their experimental rock band Xiu Xiu. Another fun trivia fact is that Chen is best known for her role as Josie Packard in Twin Peaks, and in 2016, Xiu Xiu would release a haunting tribute album composed of cover songs from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but I digress. Chen’s debut is at once a beautiful, deeply devastating and difficult to stomach picture, made as a response to a brutal government policy in ’70s cultural revolution-era China that relocated millions of Chinese youth to the countryside for a life of forced labour. It’s a harrowing indictment of the violence, greed and corruption that would rob the hopes, dreams and futures of an entire generation in the name of “progress”, and especially of the horrible treatment faced by the young girls who would be separated from their families and forcibly robbed of their bodily autonomy. MA
22. Faithless (2000)
Directed by Liv Ullmann
By comparison to Ingmar Bergman’s six-hour 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, the 154-minute Faithless is short. Both films exist in familiar Bergman territory of infidelity and divorce, with the key distinction that the director’s former partner Liv Ullmann is present in front of the camera in the former and behind it in the latter. Ullmann had previously directed one other film, Sofie in 1992, before turning to the script Bergman wrote about a woman reflecting on the affair which destroyed her marriage. At no point can Faithless be described as an “Ullmann film” rather than a Bergman one. If anything, it is Bergman pastiche—there’s a music box which plays an excerpt from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’, sumptuous reds and desolate rooms, even an elderly filmmaker living on Farö called Bergman. It is the film of an old lover carrying out Bergman’s vision at the end of his life. LC
23. In My Skin (2002)
Directed by Marina De Van
In films such as François Ozon’s Sitcom and his early short, See the Sea, French actress Marina de Van cut a compellingly unstable and otherworldly figure on the screen. The logic of her move to directing seems sound, as is the fact that with her debut feature In My Skin she made what is – for this writer – one of the most uncomfortable and gruelling explorations of the uneasy relationships between body and mind that’s ever been etched to celluloid. It’s a gore flick with a twist, once which presents bodily mutilation with a rare medical matter- of-factness and sensuality, with de Van playing a woman who becomes obsessed with a festering gash on her legs that she receives while at a party. The film was inspired by de Van’s own complex relationship with her body, and is currently awaiting a plush Blu-ray release and its due acceptance as a singular modern classic. DJ
24. Slap her… She’s French (2002)
Directed by Melanie Mayron
Anyone who thinks the verb “to stan” derived from the Eminem song of the same name about one of Slim Shady’s obsessive fans is dead wrong. The reality, if fact, is that it’s a diminutive of Stanley Kubrick, who fanboyed all over Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends, which starred Melanie Mayron as an unlucky-in-love New Yorker just trying to get through the day without being humiliated. It’s a great film which revolves around an incredible central performance, yet Mayron moved to directing shortly after her stints on camera and has never looked back. In 2002, she was airlifted into the shoot of the evocatively titled Slap Her… She’s French when the original director dropped out, and ended up making an extremely weird and lightly subversive high school comedy about a narcissistic queen bee (Jane McGregor’s Starla Grady) and her self-serving decision to take in a French exchange student (Piper Perabo’s Genevieve LePlouff ). It’s very rough around the edges, but it has some interesting visual motifs, and Mayron definitely has the type of dry sense of humour that can enhance wacky material such as this. DJ
25. The Dead Girl (2006)
Directed by Karen Moncrieff
There’s a pattern of actresses attaining a level of fame and creative freedom before making the move to directing, but sometimes the switch can occur within a more low-key context. Karen Moncrieff worked as a successful TV actor throughout the ’90s, biding her time perhaps before she put a full stop on that career and started a new one as a writer/ director, something she’s been doing since her 2002 debut, Blue Car. Today we’re focusing on her second feature, the grim, bifurcated and weirdly radical drama, The Dead Girl from 2006, which brings together a star-studded cast (Toni Collette, Brittany Murphy, Rose Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Mary Beth Hurt) to offer five different perspectives on the tragic and violent death of a sex worker. This underrated, Carver-esque tale places a local serial killer in the backdrop and explores intimate and occasionally incomprehensible human reactions to situations such as these. DJ
26. Waitress (2007)
Directed by Adrienne Shelly
This is a film not to be viewed on an empty stomach. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, who also appears in a small supporting role, Waitress is the story of small-town Southern gal Jenna (a sparkling Keri Russell), who finds solace from her abusive marriage in the simple act of baking. Specifically, Jenna loves to make pies – pies of every conceivable shape, size and flavour. There’s the Naughty Pumpkin Pie, the Jenna’s First Kiss Pie, the I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie (a blue-plate special) and, of course, the I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong And I Don’t Want Earl To Kill Me Pie. Inventive and witty, sweet yet unsentimental, it’s the kind of romantic comedy that American cinema seems to have forgotten how to make. Tragically, Shelly’s promising directorial career was cut short – she was murdered just a few months before the film made its premiere at Sundance – but Waitress remains a charming, sugar-coated testament to her talent both as a filmmaker and a performer. AW
27. Two Days in Paris (2007)
Directed by Julie Delpy
Julie Delpy is unforgettable as the hilariously frank and deeply thoughtful Celine in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. Following the success of Before Sunset and after struggling to get funding for multiple screenplays, Delpy pitched an idea for a similar rom-com featuring herself playing a French woman in a relationship with an American. Delpy was born into an acting family and cast at the age of 14 in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1984 Detective. She then studied film at NYU and shifted predominantly between European and US arthouse working with Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jim Jarmusch and Agnieszka Holland. The tortuous nature of love has been a theme in many of her roles and she continued that with Two Days in Paris; a verbose tour around various exes and a frustrating relationship with a neurotic boyfriend. It’s a sharply observed, if occasionally obvious, culture clash comedy where Delpy plays a satisfyingly hot-mess of a woman. KM
28. Whip It (2009)
Directed by Drew Barrymore
From the small girl in Spielberg’s E.T. to one of Charlie’s Angels and Adam Sandler’s greatest recurring screen partner, Drew Barrymore is one of the most successful sweethearts in the history of America’s sweethearts. After producing for 15 years, the actress fell in love with Shauna Cross’ book about a group of roller derby players, first acquiring the rights for her production company and eventually making it her directorial debut. The result is a lively and all-around great time tale of female camaraderie that only ever falters when it steps away from the women and introduces a wannabe rockstar as the love interest to Elliot Page’s delightfully named Bliss Cavendar. Still, there is much fun to be had with this classic sports comedy featuring an all-timer 2000s cast in Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat, Marcia Gay Harden and Barrymore herself. RSR
29. Higher Ground (2011)
Directed by Vera Farmiga
Best known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in the film Up in The Air, Vera Farmiga made her directorial debut with the 2011 film Higher Ground, a narrative of one woman’s lifelong struggle with faith. Farmiga initially intended only to act in the film, but when financing fell through, Tim Metcalfe, one of the screenwriters, proposed that she take on the role of director. Farmiga was drawn to the story’s twists and strong female friendships, saying it ‘pumped air’ into her spiritual life. Premiering at Sundance in 2011, it received good reviews and was nominated for the Grand Jury prize. However, with only a limited release in the US, it wasn’t a huge success at the box office – a disappointing outcome, as the film’s agnostic approach makes for a sincere and thought-provoking picture. Since then, Farmiga has produced 40 episodes of the thriller series Bates Motel, but is yet to direct again. Madeleine Wilson
30. The Adopted (2011)
Directed by Mélanie Laurent
The Anglophone world knows Mélanie Laurent best for her Nazi-bashing turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), but the French actress has had a rich career in her home country. Born in Paris in 1983 to a ballerina and the man who voices Ned Flanders in the French version of The Simpsons, Laurent got her break aged 16 from Gérard Depardieu. In 2011, she made her feature directorial debut with The Adopted, a film which begins with a couple reenacting Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Malone’s bookshop encounter in The Big Sleep. It sets the twee tone, focusing on two sisters, Lisa (Laurent) and Marine (Marie Denarnaud), and their relationship with Marine’s boyfriend Alex, a formidable role for Laurent’s Inglourious Basterds co-star Denis Ménochet. The bittersweetness often leans too far into the saccharine, albeit revealing a directorial talent which led Laurent on to make several more features including Breathe (2014) and the César-winning documentary Tomorrow (2015). LC
31. Stories We Tell (2012)
Directed by Sarah Polley
As critics, we are often guilty of overusing the phrase “personal movie” to describe a project which bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its author – aren’t all films, by their very nature, personal to some degree, their themes and emotional truths filtered through the lens of individual experiences and perspectives? Well, if that is the case, then it’s hard to think of anything more personal than Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley’s unique cine-memoir of her parents and extended family. This is a film I have watched maybe half a dozen times since it was first released, and one I have thought about perhaps more than any other over that same period. The simple reason is that it is beautifully made and brimming with compassion and humour. But more than that, it’s a film that gently forces you to confront your own preconceptions of what family is, and to what extent we allow our shared histories to shape our identities and relationships. AW
32. In a World… (2013)
Directed by Lake Bell
Often a highlight of dramas and comedies where she’s usually a supporting player, American actress Lake Bell has proven particularly adept at voice performances, with her recent TV work as Poison Ivy in the anarchic animated sitcom Harley Quinn (2019 to present) being consistently excellent. Bell’s feature debut as writer, director and producer, In a World… leans heavily on her vocal talents and the nuances of dialects and speech patterns. Starring as a voice coach competing in the movie trailer voiceover profession, the film was inspired by an article surveying the scant number of female voices in movie marketing. A somewhat scattershot comedy, In a World… is full of endearing performances from the assembled ensemble, including Fred Melamed as Bell’s character’s father, who’s a king of the voiceover world his daughter is trying to crack. JSW
33. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015)
Directed by Natalie Portman
After making her acting debut at the age of 13 in Léon, Portman rose to fame with her role in the Star Wars prequels before gaining widespread critical acclaim with her award-winning Black Swan (2010) performance. In 2015, she made the leap into her sole directorial project to date, A Tale of Love and Darkness, to tell the story of Israeli-Jewish author Amos Oz. Portman has spoken about how she felt personally connected to and inspired by Oz’s autobiography about growing up during Israel’s establishment, given her Israeli-Jewish identity, and starred as Oz’s troubled mother in the film. Though Portman also discussed the difficulty she faced as a woman when taking control during the directing process, the film is undoubtedly reflective of her creative vision. In some ways, she has engaged with the complications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but ultimately, she has presented a significantly one-sided exploration of Jewish lives by neglecting the Palestinian peoples’ experiences. Maes Kerr
34. Scottish Mussel (2015)
Directed by Talulah Riley
Making her film debut in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice, English actress Talulah Riley built up a respectable screen resume in the years that followed. She proved a reliable ensemble player in the likes of Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked (2009) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), though she perhaps remains best known for marrying Elon Musk twice. Before the second divorce came Scottish Mussel, a film that Riley wrote, directed and co-starred in, based on a story idea developed by her father. It’s a romcom in which a Glaswegian chancer (Martin Compston) tries out illegal pearl fishing in the Scottish Highlands, only to fall for an English conservationist (Riley) who’s trying to protect endangered mussels. Staggeringly inept in writing and execution, the woeful, patronising film plays out like Riley and her producers had never even met a Scottish person before her cast arrived on set. JSW
35. By the Sea (2015)
Directed by Angelina Jolie
As a director, Angelina Jolie’s remit has been to tackle social justice issues in various unsubtle ways, with a repeated interest in the subject of survival in warzones (In the Land of Blood and Honey, Unbroken, First They Killed My Father). 2015’s maligned masterwork, By the Sea, is another survival story, but an outlier in her directorial corpus, due mainly to its intimately confessional mode and uncomfortable sense of verisimilitude. The film depicts the breakdown of a glamorous couple’s marriage, with Jolie (credited as Jolie-Pitt) playing a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Pitt playing her emotionally manipulative author husband. When the film was initially revealed, the public had their collective loins girded for a vanity-flecked mega-flop. Yet the film was dismissed because of its utter bleakness and seriousness of intent, a glossy Hollywood icon’s howl into the void and a ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?’ de nos jours. DJ
36. Pitch Perfect 2 (2015)
Directed by Elizabeth Banks
It is remarkable that Elizabeth Banks came to direct the sequel to a capella smash comedy Pitch Perfect given her first directorial turn came with a segment of Movie 43 (2013) featuring a Tampax commercial in which a girl is eaten by a shark thanks to her menstrual blood. Her feature debut revealed a more capable filmic hand, working on a larger scale than her predecessor Jason Moore had in the first film. Banks’s intuition for humour has been honed through her acting career, starting with the 1998 independent film Surrender Dorothy, and as a producer with her company Brownstone Productions. Despite the significant box-office success of Pitch Perfect 2, Banks did not return to direct the third film, moving on instead to take the reins of the 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot and Cocaine Bear in 2023. Banks clearly has a flair for bringing off-kilter comedy to the Hollywood mainstream. LC
37. Paint it Black (2016)
Directed by Amber Tamblyn
If Amber Tamblyn’s performance in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants charmed audiences in 2005, her directorial debut of the 2016 film Paint it Black undoubtedly casts her in a new light. While she does not act in the film, her directorial choices of spinning cameras, flashing lights and haunting piano pieces make for a compelling story that follows two women confronting the repercussions of a suicide. The film homes in on the realisation of change, and the effects of growing up, via a dark yet honest route. While Tamblyn described the move from actor to director as an easy change, she has touched on the fact that she spent years giving herself permission to make the switch, showing the industry has a long way to go in accepting the change as more women go from actor to director. MW
38. Unicorn Store (2017)
Directed by Brie Larson
Two years after her 2015 Academy Award win for Room, Brie Larson’s directorial debut, Unicorn Store, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Although the actress reportedly found significant personal resonance in the movie, in which she also stars, this was not actually a long-gestating passion project. Larson auditioned for an abandoned version of the film several years prior, only for a directing offer to later come her way pre-Oscar win, based on shorts she’d helmed. Following the misadventures of an art school dropout who’s still obsessed with childish things, Larson’s film – written by Samantha McIntyre – bowed to mixed notices, only finally securing distribution from Netflix over a year later in the run-up to Captain Marvel’s 2019 release. While veering dangerously close to oppressive levels of whimsy, Unicorn Store proves a more nuanced exploration of creativity and maturation than its glittery exterior may suggest. JSW
39. Little Women (2019)
Directed by Greta Gerwig
There was a time where you could claim to be a paragon of counterculture cool if you knew the name Greta Gerwig. She spent much of the ’00s as a muse and focal point for the so-called “mumblecore” movement, and as an actress she cultivated a reputation as someone willing to go all-in to get the performance. She was taken under the wing of the mainstream for a while, keeping time as the best thing in a string of tired studio comedies, until she eventually chose to strike out on her own as an extremely successful writer/director. Of the three films she’s made, we’ve stumped for her sumptuous, scintillating adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s perennial 1886 novel, ‘Little Women’, over the impressive debut (Ladybird) and the box office behemoth (Barbie). Little Women, her François Truffaut homage, still gives us the best measure of Gerwig’s creatively-unshackled abilities as a director, as well as her gift for making cinema that’s as emotional and earnest as she is IRL. DJ
40. Atlantics (2019)
Directed by Mati Diop
There’s an iconic sequence in Clair Denis’ 2008 film, 35 Shots of Rum, in which Mati Diop engages in an erotically-charged bar-room dance to The Commodores’ ‘Night Shift’, cementing one of the great screen debuts of modern times. One might hazard that she has since been highly selective about her acting gigs since then, working with Denis again in Both Sides of the Blade, and in a smattering of TV shows, shorts and features. This is likely down to her side-hustle as a shorts director, which culminated in 2019’s extraordinary Atlantics, an adaptation and extension of her own 2009 short documentary. The film is an emigration story with a ghostly twist, mixing a slickly rendered and politically inclined form of social realism with an experimental, otherworldly edge. She returned in 2024 with the Golden Bear-winning Dahomey, which explores similar themes of the political legacies of colonialism, and we can’t wait to see what she comes up with next. DJ
41. Black Christmas (2019)
Directed by Sophia Takal
If you pay close attention, Sophia Takal’s acting and directing roles can be viewed as playing out in tandem. She’s portrayed reckless, subversive and wildly outspoken women in films by Joe Swanberg and her husband Lawrence Michael Levine while also examining toxic behaviour, duality and the patriarchal structures that feed on women’s insecurities through her filmmaking. Part of the post-mumblecore Brooklyn scene, she has worked on microbudgets to acclaim for her first two directorial features, Green and Always Shine. Jason Blum, following criticism of never financing a horror by a woman, asked Takal to helm a remake of pioneering slasher Black Christmas. It was released closely following the #MeToo movement and Trump’s election, with Takal and co-writer April Wolfe exploring the camaraderie of women when faced with hypocrisy, violence and trauma. Unfortunately, the nuance of her previous features was replaced with bluntly didactic commentary on the horrors of being a woman. KM
42. One Night in Miami (2020)
Directed by Regina King
Emmy and Oscar winner Regina King first broke into acting at the age of 14 with a recurring role in the American sitcom 227. Her career would mostly steer towards TV work in the years after, although it was Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton who would encourage her to drop out of college and pursue acting full-time, the two going on to collaborate in three of his films. Following years of directing for TV, King found in Kemp Powers’ eponymous play the perfect subject for her directorial debut. Although adapted from the stage and set mostly in one room, King’s direction grants One Night in Miami a dynamic, compelling feel, made even more effective by an inspired work of casting. Many tipped King to become the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar back then. That it didn’t happen remains a great travesty. RSR
43. She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Directed by Amy Seimetz
Long before Greta Gerwig ’s human Barbie asked “Do you guys ever think about dying?”, the question was on Amy Seimetz’s mind. Kate Lyn Sheil stars as a young woman (…named Amy) who is preoccupied by the feeling that she is going to die imminently. What initially seems like paranoia turns into a pandemic when her friends also begin to experience the same strange symptoms. Released at the height of the Covid pandemic, Seimetz’s film had a small release and as a result, is somewhat underseen. That’s a great shame, as it’s a haunting, beautifully unique psychological thriller that captures the unique pain of chronic anxiety. What’s more, Seimetz financed the film using her pay from 2019’s Pet Semetary, making She Dies Tomorrow arguably the best thing to come out of that limp remake. Hannah Strong
44. Bruised (2020)
Directed by Halle Berry
To this day the only Black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, Halle Berry amasses a slew of iconic roles in popular cinema, from playing the Bond girl to Pierce Brosnan’s 007 in Die Another Day to the titular Catwoman in the 2004 adaptation. The actress slipped into the director’s chair after reading the script for Bruised and believing that the main character should not be a white woman in her twenties but a middle- aged woman of colour. Berry went on to not only direct but star in this competent if not a little too formulaic drama about Jackie Justice, a down-on-her-luck fighter offered a final chance at redemption. If the film itself can’t escape the shackles of the subgenre, Berry at least turns in a compelling performance, especially when playing against the excellent Sheila Atim. RSR
45. Passing (2021)
Directed by Rebecca Hall
Fourteen years stood between Rebecca Hall’s first screen appearance aged 10 in one of her father’s TV shows and her breakthrough role in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. In the time since, the British actress worked in several successful blockbusters, including a short stint in the MCU, but it is her work in indie cinema and films such as Christine and Resurrection that cemented her as one of the most refined actresses working today. It was Hall’s own family history of passing – one of her grandfathers was a man of mixed African and European heritage who assimilated as white – that inspired the actress to adapt Nella Larsen’s book of the same name. The resulting film is a work of great tenderness but also deeply ingrained revolt, a stylish platform for career-best turns for both Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, both incredibly moving in Hall’s poignant study of stark dichotomies. RSR
46. The Lost Daughter (2021)
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
The way Maggie Gyllenhaal has confronted sexual taboos and complicated women in her acting career has generally been exciting… let’s not think too much about her underwritten role in The Dark Knight. From her daring breakthrough performance in cult S&M romance Secretary to her role as a woman struggling with a lack of success in the darkly disturbing The Kindergarten Teacher, her portrayal of conflicting desires and destructive behaviour has always been intriguing. Sure, Crazy Heart and even to an extent Sherrybaby could be seen as awards bait type resilient single mum roles, but they were also affecting and beautifully performed. When Gyllenhaal wrote to Elena Ferrante to ask for the rights to adapt her novel, The Lost Daughter, it was agreed on the condition that she would direct. Following Ferrante’s empowering request, Gyllenhaal directed a crushingly truthful drama about the demands of motherhood, desperate yearnings for freedom and incandescent rage. KM
47. Don’t Worry, Darling (2022)
Directed by Olivia Wilde
Following on from her crowd-pleasing directorial debut, Booksmart, Olivia Wilde ventured into more challenging narrative territory with this sleek psychosexual thriller starring Hot Young Things Harry Styles and Florence Pugh as a 1950s couple living a picture-perfect version of the American Dream that looks too good to be true. Which, of course, it is. Essentially a modern retelling of The Stepford Wives with added oral sex, Don’t Worry, Darling is a film whose ambition is to be admired, but also one whose bizarre denouement leaves you questioning the journey rather than savouring it. However, for all its obvious faults (and the less said about the TMI publicity tour the better), there’s no shortage of entertainment here, with Wilde once again showing that she has a knack for directing action and eliciting strong performances. One for two and with an intriguing slate of upcoming projects, there’s a sense with Wilde that her best is yet to come. AW
48. The Happiest Season (2020)
Directed by Clea DuVall
Clea DuVall became relatable to all snarky goth girls and weirdo outsiders in the 1990s thanks to her roles in The Faculty, Girl, Interrupted and Can’t Hardly Wait but it was her iconic lesbian character in Jamie Babbit’s gay conversion comedy But I’m a Cheerleader that cemented her as a name to watch. Her sexuality stopped her from grabbing certain opportunities at the time. Though her close friends and family have known she is gay since she was 16 it was something she didn’t wish to share publicly until 2016 which also marked the blossoming of her directorial career with The Intervention. For her follow-up, DuVall used her personal experiences to make one of the first gay Christmas rom-coms starring Kristen Stewart. It’s a joyfully funny celebration of family dysfunction and poignant observation on the multitude of emotions involved in being closeted and how that can impact the ones you love. KM
49. September Says (2024)
Directed by Ariane Labed
After first gaining recognition for her role in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, Greek-French actress Ariane Labed would go on to find acclaim working with Yorgos Lanthimos (whom she would later marry) on Alps and The Lobster. Since then she’s worked with filmmakers including Peter Strickland and Joanna Hogg, and this year she made her directorial debut with an adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel ‘Sisters’. September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) are sisters with a close bond living with their artist mother and enduring almost constant bullying from their classmates. After a serious incident at the girls’ school, the family relocate to the rural Irish coast, but the relationship between September and July becomes increasingly fraught as time goes on. It’s a striking, often shocking and strange debut, but one that firmly establishes Labed as an intriguing filmmaking voice. HS
50. The Balconettes (2024)
Directed by Noémie Merlant
Although Noémie Merlant has been acting since 2008, her breakthrough came when she was cast in Celine Sciamma’s remarkable romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Since then, Merlant has added a feather to her cap by launching a directing career, and for her second film, The Balconettes she co-wrote the script with Sciamma, which follows a trio of damsels in distress sweltering in their Marseilles apartment on the hottest day of the year. But when tensions with the sexy photographer across the street boil over, the free-spirited, free-loving camgirl Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), neurotic writer Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) and flighty actress Elise (Merlant on double-duty) find themselves having to hide a body. It’s a cheeky, gleefully bloody affair that takes to task France’s enduring culture of misogyny and sexual violence – and confident evidence that Merlant is a true multi-hyphenate. HS
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