Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) poster
Rating:
Giant Woman/Classic Bad Movie

1950s bad movie classic with Allison Hayes as a wife made into a giant by a passing UFO who rampages through town after her philandering husband. Painfully bad effects make for show that frequently slides into the laughable

Baise-Moi (2000)

Baise-Moi (2000) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Two Girls on a Killing Spree

Splendidly nasty French film that feels like Thelma and Louise by way of Natural Born Killers where two women pick up guns and go on a shooting spree against men who are abusive jerks. Directed by two women and cast with porn actresses, this holds little back

Barbie (2023)

Barbie (2023) poster
Rating: ★★
Doll Enters the Real World

Less a film than a phenomenon, there is something ironic about a doll that is accused of promoting negative body standards ending up leading a women’s movement. Moria has just one or two issues with this.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020) poster
Rating: ★★
All-Girl Superhero Team/Comic-Book Adaptation

The DC comic-book Birds of Prey is hijacked to become a vehicle for Harley Quinn, the breakout character from Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie gives the impression she has zero interest in making a film for comic-book fans

Black Christmas (2019)

Black Christmas (2019) poster
Rating:
Girl’s Dormitory Slasher

A remake of the work that has been cited as the first slasher film. This is less a horror film than a horror film that has been hijacked by a political agenda, delivered with a relentlessly loud and damning misandrist tone

Charlie’s Angels (2019)

Charlies Angels (2019) poster
Rating: ★★
TV Series Remake/Action Film

The second big screen revival of the hit 1970s tv series. Essentially a Girl Power version of one of the Mission: Impossible films, which turns what was originally a girl-fronted detective show into a spy caper featuring SF gadgetry

Dilili in Paris (2018)

Dilili in Paris (2018) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Animation/Journey Through Belle Epoque Paris

Michel Ocelot is one of the great underrated animators of the world. Here he makes an exquisite tribute to the Belle Epoque featuring appearances from names of the era and decked out in Steampunk inventions

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

Don't Worry Darling (2022) poster
Rating: ★★
Sinister Utopian Town

Actress Olivia Wilde creates a variant on The Stepford Wives set in an idyllic 1950s town where the women seem to be prisoners. Wilde is making a feminist parable but the plausibility of her SF scenario falls apart

Enough (2002)

Enough (2002) poster
Rating:
Abusive Husband Psycho-Thriller

Thriller about an abused wife standing up to take the law into her own hands against her husband. This has its credibility shot out by being made as a Jennifer Lopez film who does not seem to want taint the glamour of her image by seeming battered

The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

The Handmaid"s Tale (1990) poster
Rating: ★★
Fundamentalist Dystopia

The original version of the Margaret Atwood novel made way before the tv series. This aims in the general direction but is more a film that achieves a sense of disquiet rather than the true horror of its’ heroine’s situation in this world

Hundra (1983)

Hundra (1983) poster
Rating: ★★★
Amazonian Warrior

One of the better copies of Conan the Barbarian featuring Laurene Landon as a warrior woman. This is actually a better screen incarnation of Red Sonja than the subsequent film version

I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Rape and Revenge

One of the most raw and savage films ever made, this sits on a dividing line between true horror and exploitation as we experience Camille Keaton being raped with no detail spared before exacting a brutal revenge

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986)

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Jilted Woman's Elaborate Revenge

This was highly acclaimed when it came out, a mini-series about a frumpy woman taking gleeful revenge on the husband who abandoned her. This is essentially Fatal Attraction rewritten where Glenn Close is the heroine of the show and outfitted with a feminist manifesto to hilariously barbed results

The Love Witch (2016)

The Love Witch (2016) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Modern Witch

Beguiling work about a modern witch that becomes a heady swim of provocative ideas about men-women issues. This swims over with so many ideas and things to say it is never less than captivating, and is the most gorgeously colour coordinated films you will ever see

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) poster
Rating: ★★★★½
Post-Holocaust Action

30 years in the making and the results are sensational,one of the best films of the year. An action film so relentlessly foot-to-the-floor and full of kinetic wildness that it blows all its contemporaries away and sets the bar anew, while the vision of the future it creates is something utterly out of this world

Mary Shelley (2017)

Mary Shelley (2017) poster
Rating: ★★★
Frankenstein’s Author Biopic

Biopic of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. This is a women-written and directed work so the film places an interesting feminist slant on her story meaning that she wrote the book less to address themes about science and hubris than because she was in an unhappy marriage

A Nightmare Wakes (2020)

A Nightmare Wakes (2020) poster
Rating: ★★
Mary Shelley-Lord Byron Meeting

One of several films based on the famous writer’s workshop at Villa Diodati in 1816 and the meeting with Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Dr Polidori that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein

No Men Beyond This Point (2015)

No Men Beyond This Point (2015) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Alternate History/Woman-Dominated World

Film that depicts an alternate world where women have gained the upper-hand and men are a disappearing minority. This proved an unexpected delight, a mockumentary that comes in perfect and side-splitting deadpan, not to mention explores its premise with absolutely logical regard

Planet Earth (1974)

Planet Earth (1974) poster
Rating: ★★
Post-Holocaust Women Rule Society

The second of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s unsold Genesis II pilots. While you can see the series had some potential, the plot about the venture to a society where women keep men as slaves has a giggly silliness that feels like a throwback to 50s films like Queen of Outer Space

Puffball (2007)

Puffball (2007) poster
Rating: ★★
Witchcraft and Pregnancy

Nicolas Roeg returns to screens after a long absence in what would be his last film, a Fay Weldon adaptation about pagan rites, pregnancy and witchcraft that manages to sound far wilder in synopsis than how Roeg directs it all on screen

Riot Girls (2019)

Riot Girls (2018) poster
Rating: ★★
Girlfriends in the Aftermath of a Plague That Has Killed All Adults

A plague has killed off all adults. In the ruins, two girlfriends venture into the domain ruled by the tyrannical football jocks to rescue one’s brother

Send Help (2026)

Send Help (2026)
Rating: ★★
Desert Island Castaway Horrors

Sam Raimi returns with a desert island drama but things soon get twisted. Think Cast Away by way of Misery – but where Annie Wilkes gets to be the sympathetic heroine

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) poster
Rating: ★★
Feminist Slasher Film

Supposedly a feminist parody of the slasher film but one has doubts. For one, the film is lacking in discernible irony and otherwise no different from the other slasher films of the era bar the fact it was directed by a woman

The Stepford Wives (1975)

The Stepford Wives (1975) poster
Rating: ★★
Android Housewife Replacements

Ira Levin’s original novel wherein the men of a town replace their wives with subservient android duplicates seems to have its satiric point blunted when it comes to the film adaptation

Swallow (2019)

Swallow (2019) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Woman Becomes Obsessed with Eating Objects

A film of considerable creepy fascination where Haley Bennett has married into a family of wealth and develops an obsession with eating objects. This heads into an area of disturbed psychology that is quite unsettling

Wonder Woman (2017)

Wonder Woman (2017) poster
Rating: ★★★★
Comic-Book Superheroine

After three films of mixed success, DC Comics finally get their Cinematic Universe right. Director Patty Jenkins blows all of the others away with a series of exhilarating action sequences that have an entire audience cheering