18 Movies Directed By Women In 2018 You Should Watch

At the beginning of 2018, Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig became only the fifth woman in history to be nominated for a Best Director award at the Oscars. "That's one hand!" she enumerated to USA Today following her indoctrination into the sadly small mile-high club. It's a club that unfortunately looks to remain small as most female directors remain out of the awards conversation and new reports emerge that female filmmakers saw their numbers shrink in 2018.

But before you write off 2018 as a bad year for women — or at least a step backwards after 2017's industry-shattering breakthrough success with Gerwig, Patty Jenkins, and more — I implore you to take a closer look. Last year saw Anna Boden, along with Ryan Fleck, taking the helm for Marvel's upcoming Captain Marvel, and the announcement of Cathy Yan directing Birds of Prey for DC and Warner Bros. And the slate of Sundance darlings were overwhelmingly female-fronted — from Sarah Colangelo's unnerving The Kindergarten Teacher, to Desiree Akhavan's ebullient The Miseducation of Cameron Post, to Jennifer Fox's harrowing abuse drama The Tale. Lynne Ramsay, Josephine Drecker, and Chloe Zhao achieved some of the highest critical acclaim of the year for their films You Were Never Really Here, Madeline's Madeline, and The Rider, respectively. Hell, there were two movies about Ruth Bader Ginsburg directed by women in 2018.

The numbers may not be speaking, but the quality remains unquestionable. Female directors are slowly making inroads in Hollywood, and while they may not be breaking the Top 100 — or may get unjustly snubbed by the Oscars yet again — don't believe anyone when they say there are no female directors. Here 18 movies directed by women in 2018 that you should watch.

The relentlessly grim cop drama follows the moral and existential odyssey of LAPD detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman in a powerhouse performance) who is worn down by her years undercover with a gang in the California desert.

Italian realism meets magical realism in the story of a naive and optimistic young sharecropper (Adriano Tardiolo) who finds himself lost in time in Alice Rohrwacher's enchanting socially conscious fairy tale.

A quietly stunning survivalist tale and character drama, Leave No Trace is anchored by two powerful performances from Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, who star as a father and daughter who live off the grid in the forests of Portland until they're discovered and put back into society, forcing them to grapple with their relation to trauma and familial duty.

Josephine Decker's trippy cinematic experiment follows young theater performer Madeline (Helena Howard in a lauded debut performance) for whom reality and fiction begins to blur as the workshop's ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to put her troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art.

Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn as a couple struggling with infertility, in a moving and dryly funny narrative of adult relationships and middle-class anxieties.

Grimy, gory, and unapologetic, Revenge is a stylish vengeance story about a girl (Matilda Lutz) who is attacked by her boyfriend's friends and left for dead, only to rise and retaliate in a brutal fashion.

Director Sandi Tan goes on a globe-hopping investigation into the the disappearance of her Singapore-made 1992 cult classic that never came to be in an mesmerizing and personal documentary.

Jennifer Fox takes a critical, unrelenting eye to her autobiographical film about her own childhood abuse in a film starring a stunning Laura Dern that weaves reality and memory.

Lean and devoid of thrills, You Were Never Really Here is Lynne Ramsay's anti-lone wolf narrative that follows Joaquin Phoenix as a hired gun who targets men who traffic young girls, but one day finds himself embroiled in a city-wide conspiracy that endangers his loved ones.