Woman with a Movie Camera

A poignant birthday party exposes a series of family tensions in Lila Avilés’ outstanding follow-up to The Chambermaid.

Francisca Alegría brings together family trauma and ecology into a poetic journey of rebirth. A mysterious and poetic tale on our collapsing ecosystem and finding balance.

Joanna Hogg's enthralling ghost story, featuring an astonishing performance by her regular collaborator Tilda Swinton.

A gorgeous and colourful heart-warming gem from Charlotte Regan, one of the best new voices in British film.

Bette Gordon’s groundbreaking, gloriously subversive neo-noir thriller is one of the very best American underground films.

Following separation from her money-squandering husband, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) finds herself falling into the world of high-end escorting, challenging her perceptions of life and love.

French debut director Lola Quivoron revs up with a ferocious tale of a woman kickstarting a new life in the world of guerrilla motocross racing.

Alfre Woodard is quietly devastating as a weary prison warden presiding over her twelfth execution, in this Sundance-winning death row drama.

A beautifully textured study revealing the rich and troubled private life of the writer behind Carol.

Paul Mescal and Emily Watson star in this gripping Irish psychological drama that asks how far you might go to protect someone you love.

You may never look at film the same way again after watching this illuminating journey, which deconstructs the male gaze in cinema.

From writer-director Cécile Ducrocq comes a bold, provocative drama starring an electric Laure Calamy (Call My Agent!) as a single mother and sex worker in a desperate situation.

Chantal Akerman's magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.

A closeted PE teacher reckons with her identity during Thatcherite Britain in Georgia Oakley’s delicate yet gripping BAFTA-nominated debut.

Florence Pugh's first film teams her with Maisie Williams as teenage friends at a school cursed by mystery sickness.

An experimental ghost story and docudrama exploring the profound grief stemming from an unsolved murder.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s stylish and transcendent story of house music is one of the great films about dance culture.

Dalva is a 12-year-old girl who dresses and acts like a woman, blinded by her father's pernicious affections. After being taken into care, she has to learn to live like a child again, in this delicate, compassionate and powerful drama.

One dress changes everything for a family in Dionne Edwards’ brilliant debut. Defiant, uplifting and with music at its core.

Juliette Binoche plays an undercover reporter investigating the conditions faced by France’s working women in this insightful, involving drama.

Andrea Arnold's BAFTA winner and coming-of-age story starring newcomer Katie Jarvis as disaffected teen Mia and Michael Fassbender in one of his earliest film roles.

Carine Adler’s sexy and dark debut, starring Samantha Morton in her first major feature film role.

Agnès Varda’s award-winning study of those living on the margins of French society at the turn of the millennium.

Julie Dash’s groundbreaking Daughters of the Dust remains urgent and poetic and continues to resonate, inspiring Beyoncé’s iconic visual album Lemonade.

Andrea Arnold’s highly acclaimed film, winner of top prizes at Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival, is a haunting drama about a woman confronting past demons.

Clio Barnard's film about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar mixes reconstruction, interviews (performed by actors) and scenes from the plays.

Isabelle Huppert plays a plantation owner clinging to her land as civil war creeps ever closer, in Claire Denis' mesmerising rumination on the effects of colonialism.

Three young Finnish women explore love and sex in this spirited coming-of-age drama, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance 2022.

A line is painted to divide rivals in a warring family drama, circled by ice but told with warm humanity by the great Ursula Meier. Nominated for the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival.

A teenage Björk stars in this Brothers Grimm adaptation, which finds witchcraft thriving in the wilds of medieval Iceland.

Sight and Sound's 2019 film of the year is the compelling, semi-autobiographical drama from acclaimed writer-director Joanna Hogg.

Anna Friel and Michelle Williams star as two troubled girls whose tumultuous friendship takes many twists and turns.

A director struggles to film a difficult sex scene between two actors who happen to hate each other, in Catherine Breillat's witty exploration of intimacy coordination.

Isabelle Huppert stars a a filmmaker who falls for a conman, in Catherine Breillat's fearless study in will and perversity, loosely based on events from her own life.

Catherine Breillat's rigorously intellectual exploration of sexuality, about a woman who employs a gay man to spend days watching her naked.

A group of Lebanese women strive to smooth over the ever-rising religious tension between Christians and Muslims in their village.

Andrea Arnold's bold re-imagining of the Emily Brontë classic.

A lavish trip to the Turkish Riviera goes horribly awry in this disturbing tale of power, exploitation and complicity from the writer of Border.

Ghosts from the past threaten to engulf Lola’s tightly controlled present in this taut Austrian thriller from the director of Corsage.

Ursula Meier's dark semi-comic fable concerns a family living next to an unused motorway. Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet excel as the parents.

This strikingly original and enthralling feature debut from Laura Samani details the odyssey of a young mother as she tries to save her baby’s soul.

Riotous urban comedy adapted from the hit Royal Court play, about a Peckham teen affronted by the arrival of his long-lost Nigerian sibling.

Věra Chytilová's 'fictionalised documentary' uses non-actors to portray girls' lives in the cotton mills of Náchod.

An outstanding debut feature charting the emotional journey of a six-year old girl in the aftermath of her mother’s death in early 1990s Spain.

Masculine tensions reaching boiling point in this sizzling, brilliantly observed neo-western, where migrant German construction workers are pitched against villagers in remotest Bulgaria.

Set in mid-1950s Australia, with the fear of communism in the air and rabbit plagues overrunning the countryside, Ann Turner’s debut film depicts a long, hot summer seen through the eyes and wild imagination of a young girl.

Two self-confessed hedonists wreak wanton havoc in Věra Chytilová's visually spectacular neo-dadaist farce.

Starring Tom Hiddleston, a family holiday to the Isles of Scilly sees fractures emerge in this sun-filled drama from Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir).

Joanna Hogg's sleek and minimalist comedy about a pair of artists and their emotional attachment to their ultra-modernist apartment.

On a Tuscan break a fortysomething woman finds herself drawn to the company of a group of partying teens, including a young Tom Hiddleston (in one of his earliest roles).

Claire Denis’ moody and atmospheric thriller about an absent brother returning to the fold to investigate his family’s murky secrets.

The passengers on an interstellar space-liner are thrown into turmoil when their mission goes off course, in this compassionate and thought-provoking sci-fi drama.

Shockingly explicit, Catherine Breillat’s critically acclaimed Romance is one of the most controversial films of modern cinema.

Lila Avilés provides an engaging, behind-closed-doors look at the working environment of a chambermaid in one of Mexico City’s most luxurious hotels.

Jessica Hausner’s cool, witty and unsettling sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw.

A young woman seeking her biological mother journeys into dangerous territory in this gripping psychological thriller from Irish directing duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor.

Anna Biller's outrageous sexploitation satire follows bored housewife Barbi as she searches for adventure in predatory 1970s Los Angeles.

Sally El Hosaini's feature debut tells of the love and disenchantment of two British-Egyptian brothers as gangs, drugs and sexuality come between them.

A sensitive exploration of the sexual awakening and confusion of one intersex teenager.

Gripping account of repressed sexual desire in a hyper-masculine environment, with British newcomer Harris Dickinson as a virulently macho Brooklyn teen.

A mesmerising portrait of a family grappling with teenage gender dysphoria, this uplifting documentary exudes the defiant message that love is all you need.

An HIV+ mother has a chance to turn her life around when she's offered a market stall, in Leanne Welham's extraordinary drama.

Nominated for two Oscars (Best Actress – Melissa Leo - and Best Original Screenplay) Frozen River is a riveting thriller that raises questions about the borders we construct, between countries, communities and each other.

Desiree Akhavan directs and stars in this witty, razor-sharp and fearless comedy following the sexual misadventures of a bisexual Brooklynite.

Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel returns with a fine adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s existential novel. In her first feature since 2008’s The Headless Woman, Martel creates a richly layered exploration of personal malaise.

Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki relive a literary love affair, fiery and forbidden, with a remarkable legacy.

Věra Chytilová's dark, post-communist comedy. After a veterinary surgeon is sexually assaulted by two men, she uses her particular expertise in castraton to exact her revenge…

Teenage friends get the chance to be boys for a while in this supernatural, gender fluid fantasy from the director of Kiss Me.

Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone are members of a criminal gang that tears itself apart after a heist goes wrong, in Antonia Bird’s stylish thriller.

Ildikó Enyedi's magical tale of twin girls born in Budapest at the very moment that Edison’s wondrous electric light-bulb is unveiled to the world.

Sadaf Foroughi's gripping debut about a young girl's coming-of-age in a strict, traditional society.

A lesbian couple arouse the interest of their new neighbour in this erotic tale of voyeurism, power dressing and fantasy.

An inventive and acclaimed British feature following the transformation of a teenager who agrees to portray her missing college friend in a highly detailed crime reconstruction.

Nina Menkes’ extraordinary debut feature is an intoxicating blend of poetry, witchcraft and feminist critique.

A bewitching dark fairy tale about a woman struggling to escape her overbearing family.

Dostoyevsky is relocated to contemporary Tel Aviv in a riveting portrait of alienated masculinity.

Věra Chytilová's first feature is an important work of women's cinema, which contrasts the parallel stories of a gymnast (filmed as documentary) and a housewife (told as fiction).

Celebrated as the first time a woman (or a Hungarian) director was awarded the Golden Bear at Berlin, Adoption is a powerful statement on female agency.

An Iranian exile in London, who is haunted by his past, gets involved in the conflicts of a total stranger and has to see it through until the end, in this mesmerising slow-burn thriller.

Věra Chytilová's symbolic retelling of the Adam and Eve story is a ravishing tapestry of ideas, textures, and visual tropes.