21 essential films by female directors

Weekly collection in the app for the week of August 21, 2026.

Auteur theory was never about gender, and these directors proved it: Chantal Akerman making three hours of housework the most radical film of its decade, Varda wandering with her camera, Campion's pianos, Ramsay filming grief like a wound that will not close. In 2022, Sight and Sound's critics' poll crowned Jeanne Dielman the greatest film ever made.

This collection of 21 films ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of August 21, 2026, featuring The Piano. It carries two films each from Campion, Ramsay and Bigelow, who was the only woman to win the Best Director Oscar until Chloé Zhao in 2021.

The collection

1. The Piano (1993) Campion Featured A mute Scottish bride arrives in colonial New Zealand with her daughter and her piano, and starts a dangerous bargain to win the instrument back, key by key. Cast: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill
2. The Power of the Dog (2021) Campion On a 1920s Montana ranch, a brilliant, cruel cattleman wages psychological war on his brother's new wife and her gentle son, until the film reveals who is really hunting whom. Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirsten Dunst
3. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Akerman Three days in the life of a widowed mother, shown in near real time: cooking, errands, and quiet routine, filmed so precisely that the smallest crack in it lands like a thunderclap. Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck
4. Vagabond (1985) Varda A young woman is found frozen in a ditch in the south of France, and the film traces her last weeks on the road through the people who met her and mostly failed her. Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Yolande Moreau
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Ramsay After her son commits a school massacre, a mother replays his childhood in fragments, asking whether he was born wrong or whether she failed to love him. Cast: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller
6. You Were Never Really Here (2017) Ramsay A traumatized veteran who rescues trafficked children with a hammer takes a job that goes wrong; a hitman thriller compressed into pure nerves and almost no violence shown on screen. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov
7. The Hurt Locker (2008) Bigelow An American bomb-disposal technician in Baghdad takes risks his teammates cannot understand, because defusing bombs is the only thing that makes him feel alive. Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty
8. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) Bigelow A young CIA analyst spends a decade obsessively tracking Osama bin Laden, through torture rooms, dead ends and bureaucracy, to a night-vision raid told with documentary cool. Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton
9. Lost in Translation (2003) Sofia Coppola A fading movie star and a newlywed young woman, both stranded in a Tokyo hotel, strike up a short friendship that hovers just short of romance. Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi
10. Lady Bird (2017) Gerwig A restless Catholic-school senior in Sacramento fights with her mother, tries on identities and dreams of escaping to New York; funny, specific and forgiving to everyone. Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts
11. Beau Travail (1999) Denis A French Foreign Legion sergeant in Djibouti is consumed by jealousy of a beautiful young recruit; military drills become choreography, and the final dance scene is legendary. Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
12. Toni Erdmann (2016) Ade A retired prankster father, worried his corporate-consultant daughter has forgotten how to live, invades her Bucharest work life wearing false teeth and a wig; a nearly three-hour German comedy that earns it. Cast: Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek, Michael Wittenborn
13. Fish Tank (2009) Arnold A volatile fifteen-year-old on an Essex council estate dreams of dancing, then gets dangerously entangled with her mother's charming new boyfriend. Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
14. Daughters of the Dust (1991) Dash In 1902, a Gullah family on a South Carolina sea island gathers before migrating north, weighing the old ways against the new; told in images that move like memory rather than plot. Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones
15. Salaam Bombay! (1988) Nair A boy abandoned by his family survives among Bombay's street children, tea stalls and brothels, played by real street kids the production trained. Cast: Shafiq Syed, Hansa Vithal, Chanda Sharma
16. Wendy and Lucy (2008) Reichardt A young woman driving to Alaska for work is stranded in Oregon when her car dies and her dog disappears; a small, devastating film about being one setback from the edge. Cast: Michelle Williams, Wally Dalton, Larry Fessenden
17. Orlando (1992) Potter Tilda Swinton plays a nobleman who lives four hundred years and wakes up one morning as a woman; Virginia Woolf's gender-hopping fantasy made playful and gorgeous. Cast: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau
18. Seven Beauties (1975) Wertmüller A preening Neapolitan small-timer survives the war and a concentration camp by selling off every scrap of his dignity; a comedy that turns pitch black. Cast: Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, Shirley Stoler
19. Boys Don't Cry (1999) Peirce The true story of Brandon Teena, a young trans man building a new life in small-town Nebraska, and the friends and lovers who embraced and then betrayed him. Cast: Hilary Swank, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard
20. La Ciénaga (2001) Martel Two middle-class Argentine families drift through a sweltering summer of gin, minor injuries and a filthy swimming pool, while dread gathers like the humidity. Cast: Mercedes Morán, Graciela Borges, Martín Adjemián
21. Selma (2014) DuVernay Martin Luther King Jr. plans the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights marches, negotiating with presidents, rivals and his own exhausted movement scene by scene. Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson

Keep your place

Add the films you have not seen to your watchlist in I Like Movies and mark the ones you have; the app keeps your place as you work through the collection. A new themed collection lands in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

What is Jeanne Dielman and why is it famous?

Chantal Akerman's 1975 film watches three days of a widow's domestic routine in near real time, until the routine fractures. In 2022 it topped Sight and Sound's once-a-decade critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.

Where should I start with this list?

The Piano for sweep, Lost in Translation or Lady Bird for ease, Beau Travail for the ending alone, and We Need to Talk About Kevin when you are ready to be wrecked.

The week before: True crime, eighties style: 21 films. The week after: Mafia cinema: 21 essential films. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.