10 Underrated Female Directors You Should Know About

10 Underrated Female Directors You Should Know About

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar, for The Hurt Locker, and Greta Gerwig turned a movie about a plastic doll into the highest grossing film of 2023 worldwide. Both of them earned that attention, and you can read more on Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig's profile pages. But awards season and opening weekend numbers only capture a sliver of what women have been doing behind the camera for decades, often on tiny budgets, in languages other than English, in genres critics don't take seriously until years after the fact.

Here are ten directors who deserve more of your attention than they usually get, with a film to start with and a link to the full profile for each.

1. Lynne Ramsay

Ramsay has one of the strangest resumes for a director this respected: across more than two decades she's made a strikingly small number of features, with years-long gaps between them, and every one still gets talked about like it came out last month. We Need to Talk About Kevin is the place to start. Adapted from Lionel Shriver's novel, it follows a mother, played by Tilda Swinton, piecing together how her son became a killer, told almost entirely through fragmented memory and a color palette that keeps bleeding red into ordinary scenes. Ramsay trusts images over dialogue more than almost anyone working today. Look up her full profile and work backward through the rest of what she's made.

2. Mira Nair

Nair had already won the Golden Lion at Venice for Monsoon Wedding, which is not a small thing, and it's still strange how rarely she comes up outside film-festival conversation. The film follows a chaotic, multi-generational Punjabi wedding in Delhi and manages to be a comedy, a family drama, and a quietly serious film about class and secrets, without any of it feeling forced. She's spent decades making films that move fluidly between India and its diaspora. Her other work is worth digging into at her director page.

3. Chloé Zhao

Zhao isn't obscure anymore. She won the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland, and calling her underrated today would be a stretch. But go back one film to The Rider, made before anyone outside indie festivals knew her name, and you'll see what she was doing when nobody was paying attention: shooting on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with a cast of real rodeo cowboys, led by Brady Jandreau essentially playing a version of his own life after an injury ended his riding career. It's a quieter, rougher film than Nomadland, and it's the one that convinced people she had something real. Her director profile has the rest.

4. Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi's real landmark is Persepolis, the animated adaptation of her own graphic novel about growing up in Iran during and after the revolution, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. That's the film that made her name. Radioactive, her biopic of Marie Curie starring Rosamund Pike, landed to a much cooler reception, and it's honestly the weaker entry point into her work rather than the best one. Still, it's the Satrapi film we've got up on the site, and Pike's performance clears a bar the script keeps lowering. For the fuller picture of what Satrapi can do, start with her profile and track down Persepolis on your own.

5. Debra Granik

Granik has a habit of finding actors before anyone else does. She cast Vera Farmiga in one of her first film roles in Down to the Bone, and years later cast a teenager named Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, which became Lawrence's breakout and earned her a first Oscar nomination. Granik later made Leave No Trace with Thomasin McKenzie, another lead who went on to a real career. Winter's Bone itself is a bleak, precise film about a teenage girl hunting for her missing father through the rural Ozarks meth trade, and it holds up as well as anything from that stretch of American independent film. Granik's own name never got remotely the recognition of the actors she launched, which is its own kind of underrated. More on her at her director page.

6. Alice Rohrwacher

Happy as Lazzaro won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2018, and it's still the best introduction to what Rohrwacher does with the space between Italian neorealism and folk tale. It follows a guileless young sharecropper on an isolated tobacco estate, shot on grainy 16mm that fits the story's blurred sense of time, and about halfway through it does something with the timeline I won't spoil except to say it recontextualizes everything before it. Rohrwacher's other films work the same territory from different angles. Her profile page has them.

7. Karyn Kusama

Jennifer's Body got panned when it came out in 2009, marketed as a horror comedy built around Megan Fox for an audience of teenage boys, when it's actually a sharper film about female friendship and rage than the marketing let on. It took the better part of a decade for critics to circle back and admit they'd misjudged it, and now it's a regular example of a film reclaimed as a feminist horror text well after the fact. Kusama's debut, Girlfight, with Michelle Rodriguez as a teenage boxer, won a directing prize at Sundance and remains the better-kept secret of the two. She's moved between horror, drama, and prestige television since, and it's worth tracking through her director profile.

8. Joanna Hogg

The Souvenir is Hogg looking directly at her own past: it follows a young film student in early-1980s London who falls into a relationship with an older, troubled man, and Hogg cast Tilda Swinton alongside Swinton's own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, playing mother and daughter on screen. It's a slow, exacting film, built out of long takes and rooms that feel lived in rather than dressed, and it rewards patience more than most modern arthouse films bother to. Hogg had already been making distinctive, restrained British films for years before this one finally got her wider notice. Her other work is worth the search, starting at her director page.

9. Haifaa al-Mansour

Wadjda was the first feature film shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia, and it became the country's first-ever submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It follows a headstrong ten-year-old girl saving up to buy a bicycle in a place where girls riding bicycles draws disapproval, and it manages to be funny and specific rather than issue-driven, even with the issues obviously sitting under the surface. By most accounts, al-Mansour was the first Saudi woman to direct a feature film at all. Her director profile is worth a look.

10. Jennifer Kent

The Babadook opened quietly in 2014 and then built one of the stranger second lives any horror film has had: William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist, said publicly it was one of the scariest films he'd seen, and years later the title character became an unlikely internet icon after a streaming platform mistakenly filed the film under an LGBTQ category. Strip away the internet afterlife and it's still just a tightly made, genuinely upsetting film about a widowed mother, her son, and a picture book that won't stop showing up. Kent took a long gap before her follow-up, The Nightingale, which is its own kind of underrated. Her full profile has both.

Discover More

One more thing on Haifaa al-Mansour, because it's the detail that sticks. As she's described it in interviews, getting Wadjda made inside Saudi Arabia sometimes meant directing scenes from inside a production van, watching on a monitor and giving instructions over a walkie-talkie, because custom at the time didn't allow her to stand in public alongside her own male crew. That's what "underrated" actually looks like once you get past the word itself: not a marketing label, but a director working around constraints most of the industry never has to think about.

If any of these sent you down a rabbit hole, the rest of our director directory is a good place to keep going, and our full library of movies has plenty more where these came from.