Please recommend me some good (real) feminist films

[palomatoast]

I've just watched Poor Things and need eye bleach. I stupidly only vaguely read the blurb and a quote from the lead Emma Stone about how it's about female emancipation and the patriachy. Well it's definitely about the patriarchy alright.

Please recommend me some good (real) feminist films, ideally directed by women. I need to cleanse my soul.

@McSilkson - it'll be too late now, I'm afraid, but if you click on the three dots at the top righthand corner of your post, you will get a drop down menu that includes an edit function. Unfortunately it's only available for a short time (I think it is 15 minutes, but I could well be wrong).

Celine and Julie go boating

Great film about a female friendship where the two women take control of the plot and change the ending

Inspires Desperately Seeking Susan which is also brilliant

I thought both Barbie and Poor Things were great.

Thelma and Louise is one of the best on female friendship.

All About my Mother.

Pedro Almodovar is male but it's a film about women. It has been a while since I've seen it, but I remember thinking at the time how the director had subtly inverted the gender tropes of the characters, so the females were strong and stoic, and the men (including the transgender women) were weaker and prone to emotional collapse.

It's Almodovar though, so all the characters have flaws (mimicking the reality that no one is wholly good or bad - and prone to desires and selfishness).

I think it can be said to be feminist not because it sets out to virtue signal the fact it is for women, but in that it explores a female led story without it being the male characters driving the plot in the second and third acts.

It's interesting seeing the list and that there are male directors and writers out there who do really get women eg Willy Russell with Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine

I prefer seeing films that are 'accidentally feminist " - proper rounded female characters with agency, than ones which lecture me about what they think feminism is.

I didn't get Poor Things. I found it very dull. Basically a crude story about an inch deep, where male characters set out to control a female character, but are undone by their own predictable weakness. But the female character played by Emma Stone is just a glorified sex toy whose redemption arc is finding and marrying a suitable man at the end. Maybe I missed something but I couldn't help but think it was a Hollywood pastiche of European Arthouse (and not as clever as it imagined itself to be).

The irony of this is that in the actual novel on which the film is partly based, the sexual adventures of the surgically created Bella Baxter section is later revealed to be the lurid fantasy of the lacklustre husband, which the 'real world' Bella angrily refutes in the final part of the novel.

I'm currently reading and watching South Riding. Winifred Holtby.
It has an excellent feminist lead, and lots of themes of social mobility.
The 1974 adaptation is really good.