The renaissance of women directors producing more movies started around 2009. When Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Director for The Hurt Locker, there was a shift. While the numbers remain staggeringly low relative to male working directors, women-directed films have garnered more acclaim, bigger budgets, and huge box office success — for instance, Patty Jenkins and Chloé Zhao helming huge superhero properties for DC and MCU, respectively. But also: thanks in part to international directors having arthouse hits that receive acclaim at the world’s most recognized film institutions, women have seen their films reach wider audiences. Like Julia Ducournau’s win at Cannes for Titane and Celine Sciamma’s breakthrough success A Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. The 2010s have been a fruitful creative era for women filmmakers across the globe. As such, here are the best 2010s movies directed by women.
8 High Life
A24
French auteur Claire Denis used her artistic prowess to craft a psycho-sexual, post-apocalyptic nightmare set in the depths of the darkest parts of space. Led by a dark, convicted performance from Robert Pattinson and co-starring rap superstar Andre Benjamin alongside French icon Juliette Binoche, High Life is as epic as it is intimate. Binoche plays a sinister scientist, playing mind games with all the inmates aboard a ship set to travel to the sun. The film is spliced together with flashbacks and violent attacks while all the passers figure out who to trust. High Life is one of Denis’ best in her long, storied career.
7 The Souvenir
A gauzy and woozy drama of young dumb love set in the 1980s, The Souvenir is an autobiographical look at the life of a young film student from British director Joanna Hogg. With a career-making performance from film lineage royalty, Tilda Swinton’s daughter, Honor, shines as the young and confused artist trying to come into her own. There isn’t much plot, but a slow, precise look at the confounding moments of creating film and navigating a life of love with someone much older than you.
6 The Farewell
A thoughtful, loving look at the troubled relationships extended families weave through generational pain and cultural differences, The Farewell was Lulu Wang’s masterful entry to American independent cinema. Starring Awkwafina as the American descent from her family’s Chinese traditions, she’s forced to reconcile those differences when she finds out her grandma is dying. The film rides the thin line that many family dramas do, proving to be poignant, funny and because of its specificity, universal as well.
5 Zero Dark Thirty
Columbia Pictures
Kathryn Bigelow is no stranger to brutal, frenetic flares of action. Crafting a career in the vein of some of the best action directors of the last 25 years, she decided to continue her interest in America’s war in the middle-east. Following up her Oscar-Winning The Hurt Locker with Zero Dark Thirty. A tense, claustrophobic look at the hunt for Osama bin Laden is supercharged by a career performance from Jessica Chastain as the woman who led the hunt and dedicated a good portion of her life to tracking him down. The film is full of signature Bigelow moments including car chases, shootouts, and assassinations that add an air of trauma, caution, and tragedy.
4 First Cow
Kelly Reichardt’s study of male friendships amidst the American frontier is also a concise and meticulous depiction of the Pacific Northwest during the Gold Rush. In First Cow, Reichardt’s patient direction proved effective when focusing on the shifting and tumultuous climate that many of the men who traverse it face. The film features winning performances from John Magaro and Orion Lee as well. Playing two trappers seeking their fortune. Thriving on the riches for that they beckon, capitalism has to offer.
3 Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig’s heartfelt directorial debut showed she had all the goods to be a great writer-director. A humorous, energetic look at the life of a senior in high school whose insistence on being herself drives her working class-mother up a wall, Lady Bird is honest about insecurity. With an unhinged Laurie Metcalf as the mother and the always reliable Saoirse Ronan as the titular character, the film is strengthened by their incredible performances, playing off the mother-daughter dynamic with humorous tension. The two are at odds, but also grateful for one another. Gerwig’s film is an unflinching look at growing into the person you will become.
2 Portrait of a Lady On Fire
Camera Film
A slow burn of secrecy, intimacy, and an affair that could ruin the lives of the women involved, A Portrait of a Lady On Fire is a transcendent period drama. Not only an investigative look into the creative process and the artist’s relationship with authenticity. Noémie Merlant and Adele Haenel breathe nuanced complexities to their performances as the artist/muse relationship comes to a crescendo. Which makes the tragedy of their forbidden relationship all the more real, tender, and heartbreaking. Celine Sciamma does her best work here as a director of careful and measured relationships about women discovering themselves.
1 We Need To Talk About Kevin
BBC Films
Lynn Ramsay’s haunting, nightmarish, and darkly beautiful tale of motherhood gone awry is an epic masterwork of tragedy. An all-too-real look at what it’s like having your child grow into and become a murderer under Ramsay’s elegant but brutal direction was sure to make your skin crawl. The depiction of the violence is blunt and bloody. While the relationship between Tilda Swinton as she struggles to love a child who hates her, played with a psychopathy creepiness by Ezra Miller, is as chilling as it gets. As we slowly watch the relationships deteriorate and the house combust in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
