The Times: 50 great films by women Sex, war, betrayal, crime, romance, bromance: no topic has been off limits for female directors

Having a screenwriter husband does mean we watch a lot of films. He’s currently looking for a female director for one of his Hollywood film scripts. So in praise of all films by women…

Marie Antoinette (2006) (our daughter loved this)
Sofia Coppola
Coppola’s rock-and-rococo account of the French queen’s life at court is a sensory feast, and engaging emotionally too, focusing on another of her independent souls adrift in alien territory, as with Scarlett Johansson’s character in the excellent Lost in Translation.

Selma (2014)
Ava DuVernay
DuVernay’s bravura account of the Selma civil rights marches in 1965, led by David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King, is gripping and atmospheric; the scenes on Edmund Pettus Bridge as marchers are charged by mounted police have the power of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence. Check out her stirring documentary about the US prison system, 13th.

The Souvenir (2019)
Joanna Hogg
The British director moved from mainstream television to a niche all her own: semi-autobiographical, spare yet affecting. The Souvenir replays her youth, mired in an affair with an upper-crust addict (wonderfully portrayed by Tom Burke), but discovering cinema along the way; Hogg started with Unrelated, an unsparing tale of the middle classes behaving badly abroad.

Leave No Trace (2018)
Debra Granik
Granik is rural America’s great but melancholy poet. She directed Jennifer Lawrence’s striking debut, 2010’s Winter’s Bone. In the lovely Leave No Trace a father tries to hide his daughter from the authorities by camping in the forest.

Lady Bird (2017) 
Greta Gerwig
Gerwig’s directorial debut is 95 minutes of everything — so much heart, humour and plot that it’s staggering she managed to keep it so short. That deftness is her great skill, employed on Little Women too, which glided between times with peerless grace.

For the full list: 50 great films by women Sex, war, betrayal, crime, romance, bromance: no topic has been off limits for female directors