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stainedglassgardens · 6 years

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Favourite woman-directed films I saw in 2018

It’s funny because when the year started I thought I could never watch 52 films by women, considering that I usually barely watch fifty films a year, total. Then I watched 306 new-to-me films, out of which 105 were directed by women.

I saw so many good woman-directed films that I thought it would be hard to choose ten to make this list, but then I realised that I only had to include those films that absolutely blew my mind, and bam! Ten already.

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, Ildikó Enyedi, 2017)

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1994)

The Midnight Swim (Sarah Adina Smith, 2014)

Raw (Grave, Julia Ducournau, 2016)

M.F.A. (Natalia Leite, 2017)

Daisies (Sedmikrásky, Věra Chytilová, 1966)

Always Shine (Sophia Takal, 2016)

Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017)

Very broadly speaking, these ten can be divided into three categories. There’s gorey, imaginative, feminist genre -- Revenge, M.F.A., Raw; there’s visually and/or narratively boundary-expanding cinema -- Daisies, Always Shine, The Midnight Swim, We Need to Talk About Kevin, On Body and Soul; and then there are the indie stories about marginalised people, which might be my favourites of all -- here, River of Grass and Winter’s Bone.

When 2018 started I had only seen one film by Kelly Reichardt, and none by Debra Granik. Now they’re both among my favourite filmmakers. When I saw my first Kelly Reichardt film, years ago, I thought Wow, some people do make films about actual people. I’ve seen all of them now, and I liked all of them, but it wasn’t that hard picking River of Grass for this list -- there’s something so Carson McCullers, so Flannery O’Connor about the story, and visually it is so dreamlike.

I put Debra Granik together with Kelly Reichardt because their stories feel similar in many ways (and both feel similar to Agnès Varda’s), and seeing Winter’s Bone I was just completely blown away. It’s one of those films I would unreservedly call a masterpiece, and recommend to absolutely everyone. What places it above Leave No Trace (which I put as my number one new release of 2018) is the plot, and the ending especially, both completely surreal and mundane, like a cherry on top of spectacular acting and visuals worthy of Dorothea Lange .

Another slap in the face was We Need to Talk About Kevin. Together with a few other films in this list, it made me ponder what film can really do in terms of creating intricate, media-specific experiences that ultimately serve to provide a more rounded understanding of reality and what it means to be a person. We Need to Talk About Kevin was the first of these and probably had the biggest impact on me. Lynne Ramsay really is one of the few people with a completely unique vision.

I put Daisies, Always Shine, The Midnight Swim and On Body and Soul in the same category, although they don’t have a lot in common with each other, because they all have this aspect of visual and/or narrative boundary-pushing. It is so incredible that Daisies still feels like that to a first-time viewer today, even though it came out more than fifty years ago.

I saw Always Shine and The Midnight Swim around the same time and keep associating them in my mind for the nods to David Lynch, indie feel, and non-linear storytelling. Probably The Midnight Swim impressed me more, because it was the first time (and only, so far) that I saw a first-person narrative that looked quite like that.

On Body and Soul belongs in the same area of this mental map mainly because of the dream sequences. Before I saw it I probably would have found it impossible to talk about dreams in a way that didn’t feel recycled, but this managed just that. The juxtaposition of the wild forest animals at night with the cattle in the slaughterhouse during the day walks such a fine line between surrealism and social commentary, and the slaughterhouse sequences are all filmed with such incredible tact -- which only serves to make them more shocking.

Then there are the great genre films. Raw was fantastic, in part because it is so rare for a French person such as myself to find a French film to her liking, but also because everything about it felt so different -- it is firmly set in the horror genre, but it also draws from such a wide range of influences. M.F.A. and Revenge mirror each other in many ways, because they’re both rape-revenge films, a sub-genre I am incredibly glad and grateful that women are tackling in such interesting and challenging ways. I liked M.F.A. better, maybe, because it felt more real, and the ending better-thought-out, but if anything, I’d recommend a double-feature night to watch both.

Great films that didn’t quite make the cut, in no particular order:

Addicted to Fresno (Jamie Babbit, 2015): best sex comedy about actual grown-ups

I Think We’re Alone Now (Reed Morano, 2018): best post-apocalyptic “everyone is gone from the surface of the Earth but us” film

Ginger & Rosa (Sally Potter, 2012): best Cold-War England drama

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010) : best contemplative Western

Into the Forest (Patricia Rozema, 2015): best post-apocalyptic survivalist feminist film

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, Agnès Varda, 1984) : best film shot in my area of France

Khadak (Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, 2006): best science fiction film that takes place in Mongolia

Over time, I’m finding it easier and easier to watch more woman-directed films, both because I know where to look and because I’ll find it easier to relax and get into any genre at all when I know there’ll be infinitely less chance of rampant misogyny ruining an otherwise perfectly good film. It seems barely believable, now, to think that five years ago I didn’t know one single woman director, when clearly the quality and the variety are there, the work is there, and it stands so tall on its own.

Full 105-film list under the cut!

The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2016)

Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)

Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)

A United Kingdom (Amma Asante, 2016)

Addicted to Fresno (Jamie Babbit, 2015)

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, 2013)

Novitiate (Maggie Betts, 2017)

Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018)

Blue My Mind (Lisa Brühlmann, 2017)

Daisies (Sedmikrásky, Věra Chytilová, 1966)

The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo, 2018)

Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983)

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, 2013)

Lick the Star (Sofia Coppola, 1998)

The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017)

17 GIrls (17 Filles, Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, 2011)

The Edge of Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2016)

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (Alexandra Dean, 2017)

Madeline’s Madeline (Josephine Decker, 2018)

Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985)

Raw (Grave, Julia Ducournau, 2016)

On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, Ildikó Enyedi, 2017)

Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017)

The Spy Who Dumped Me (Susanna Fogel, 2018)

Deidra and Laney Rob a Train (Sydney Freeland, 2017)

Twinsters (Samantha Futerman and Ryan Miyamoto, 2015)

The Trader (Sovdagari, Tamta Gabrichidze, 2018)

The Lifeguard (Liz W. Garcia, 2013)

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

They (Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, 2017)

Tig (Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York, 2015)

The Deuce of Spades (Faith Granger, 2011)

Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)

Casting JonBenet (Kitty Green, 2017)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

Axolotl Overkill (Helene Hegemann, 2017)

The Firefly (La Luciérnaga, Ana Maria Hermida, 2015)

Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017)

The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015)

The Land of Steady Habits (Nicole Holofcener, 2018)

Slums of Beverly Hills (Tamara Jenkins, 1998)

Private Life (Tamara Jenkins, 2018)

The Quiet Hour (Stéphanie Joalland, 2014)

Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, 2016)

By the Sea (Angelina Jolie, 2015)

Sweet Bean (あん, An, Naomi Kawase, 2015)

Lovesong (So Yong Kim, 2016)

I Feel Pretty (Abby Kohn, 2018)

Radius (Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard, 2017)

Irreplaceable You (Stephanie Laing, 2018)

The Feels (Jenée LaMarque, 2017)

Breathe (Respire, Mélanie Laurent, 2014)

Galveston (Mélanie Laurent, 2018)

Octavio is Dead! (Sook-Yin Lee, 2018)

M.F.A. (Natalia Leite, 2017)

Aloft (Claudia Llosa, 2014)

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (Jodie Markell, 2008)

A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971)

Dude (Olivia Milch, 2018)

The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 2015)

I Think We’re Alone Now (Reed Morano, 2018)

Woodshock (Kate and Laura Mulleavy, 2017)

Girl Asleep (Rosemary Myers, 2015)

Tout ce qui brille (Géraldine Nakache and Hervé Mimran, 2010)

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017)

Ginger & Rosa (Sally Potter, 2012)

Beneath the Harvest Sky (Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, 2013)

Angels Wear White (嘉年华, Vivian Qu, 2017)

Cargo (Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, 2017)

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2017)

River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1994)

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013)

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

Into the Forest (Patricia Rozema, 2015)

Before I Fall (Ry Russo-Young, 2017)

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Lorene Scafaria, 2012)

The Riot Club (Lone Scherfig, 2014)

Cracks (Jordan Scott, 2009)

Everything Beautiful is Far Away (Pete Ohs and Andrea Sisson, 2017)

Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)

Laggies (Lynn Shelton, 2014)

Outside In (Lynn Shelton, 2017)

Berlin Syndrome (Cate Shortland, 2017)

Lipstick Under My Burkha (Alankrita Shrivastava, 2016)

The Midnight Swim (Sarah Adina Smith, 2014)

Buster’s Mal Heart (Sarah Adina Smith, 2016)

The Lure (Córki dancingu, Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015)

Always Shine (Sophia Takal, 2016)

Shirkers (Sandi Tan, 2018)

Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong (Emily Ting, 2015)

Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2016)

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, Agnès Varda, 1962)

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, Agnès Varda, 1984)

Love, Cecil (Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2018)

Jupiter Ascending (The Wachowskis, 2015)

Mr. Roosevelt (Noël Wells, 2017)

Woman Walks Ahead (Susanna White, 2017)

Khadak (Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, 2006)

Salesman (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1969)

#women directors #52 films by women #films #2018 in review

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