Writer-director Noah Baumbach, with his observational camera style and slice-of-life dialogue, places attention on everyday scenes that we don’t typically get in mainstream films, and Greta Gerwig (who also co-wrote the film) gives an excellent performance.Īnother tale of growing up, this time focusing on Grace, a young counselor for at-risk children. Though coming-of-age stories are common enough, this film still carries the feeling of a story seldom told. And I regret to say that I have not yet seen July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know.Ī simply-told, well-observed portrait of twentysomething Frances as she navigates her way through young adulthood. The same goes for Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right, which I frankly found to be juvenile in its portrayal of same-sex relationships ( it validates, whether unintentionally or not, the myth that all lesbians secretly want men). But while Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides has something interesting to say about male perceptions of femininity, I didn’t feel that it fit this list. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t find female voices out there – Sofia Coppola, Miranda July, and Lisa Cholodenko are three that immediately come to mind, and they each have work available on Netflix. The dearth of respected woman directors is a persistent problem in the film industry. My second disclaimer: though the selected films all feature wonderfully vibrant and complex female characters, the directors of these films are all male. I promise that they were each chosen with good reason. Some of the selected films pass the Bechdel Test, others don’t. Also, it is conceivable for a female character to be strong and complex without talking to another woman. It is fairly useful when it comes to determining female representation in a given film, but it indicates nothing about how women are characterized in said film – a film which passes the test could still have a substantial amount of misogynist content ( this complaint was levelled against Guardians of the Galaxy last year). While the Bechdel Test can be a fun tool to use on your favorite movies (it’s almost guaranteed that few of them will pass), the fact that some use it as the standard by which to hold movies is worrisome. The test originated in a 1985 comic written by Alison Bechdel, and has risen dramatically in popularity in recent years, so much so that Swedish cinemas now incorporate the test into their movie ratings. The idea is that if a film passes the Bechdel Test – that is, if it features a dialogue scene in which two women talk about something besides a man – then the film presents a fairer representation of femininity. The first concerns what has become known as the Bechdel Test. However, I’d like to make two disclaimers. What follows is a list of a few excellent films with strong female leads, currently streaming on Netflix. Though quantity doesn’t determine quality, it is still disconcerting to see that, by and large, the media tells the stories of white males far more than it tells those of any other race or gender.įortunately, because the amount of material to be found online is so broad, it is getting easier and easier to find films that are more woman-centric, provided that you look long enough and in the right places. A quick glance at a list of Netflix recommendations, for instance, will reveal the not-surprising but nevertheless harmful overrepresentation of white men. However, just because we are saturated with media does not mean that we see equal representation of different populations. Living in the age of the internet has given us unprecedented access to popular forms of entertainment – in recent years, expressions like “binge watching” have become an accepted part of our lexicon, indicating how normalized extreme media consumption has become.
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