Female Film Critics 24/375
In The Art of Adventure, director Alison Reid (The Woman Who Loved Giraffes) tells the globe-trotting tale of Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster, two longtime Canadian friends whose shared passion for nature and drive to see the world beyond North America led them on an 18-month odyssey across 50,000 miles and 19 countries in the late 1950s — and, later, fueled their careers as passionate stewards of the environment.
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Unfolding in the style of horror film, which it is, directors Laura Poitras’ and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s They’re Here documents ICE’s illegal, combative activity in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this past winter. Immediately mimicking the menacing, stalking point-of-view shots that evoke anxiety in that genre of films, the association is apt given ICE’s threatening, frightening, even terrorizing men, women, and children. In a revealing, informative 25 minutes, They’re Here presents the array of tactics used by ICE agents in military uniforms and, almost universally, with partial masks covering their faces, thereby concealing their identity.
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Ostensibly about the power of unions and workers uniting for better wages and improved job conditions in the microcosm of New York City, Union Town truly creates empathy and even admiration for the people who keep the Big Apple and America moving, one delivery at a time.
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“My job is to observe the world and reflect it back in a single panel,” says longtime New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly. How women cartoonists see the world—and where they find the funny—is the subject of her documentary Women Laughing, co-directed with Kathleen Hughes. Donnelly convenes a group of her New Yorker colleagues around a round table at New York’s historic Algonquin Hotel, provides them with sheets of paper and art supplies—and they draw.
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one of a handful of women in the documentary Cheyenne driven to compete at riding wild broncos on the rodeo circuit after the sport excluded them for roughly a century. Debuting at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, the film builds to the final competition at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming—the end-of-season rodeo billed as “the Daddy of them all.”
Directed by Taimi Arvidson, Cheyenne covers a smattering of women’s rodeo history through historical footage but largely focuses on four American competitors and their coach, Daryl. There’s no crying in the arena, he warns, calling it “a bad image for everybody.” Anyone flung to the dirt needs to walk it off with a wave and a smile.
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What a charming and captivating time capsule about a woman who embodied her time and then transcended it. Director Sadie Frost’s Twiggy is, of course, a delightful memory trip back to the swinging ‘60s in London and the ascendency of working class teenager Lesley Hornby to the heights of fashion fame. As gamine faced, slim and androgynous Twiggy, she broke all the rules for what women should look and act like. But because Twiggy is so singular in her authenticity and unabashedly positive nature, the film become a stirring portrait of something else entirely.
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Twiggy is director Sadie Frost’s appealing, charming documentary about the 1960s fashion icon known as Twiggy, whose super-skinny form and androgynous looks transformed how the fashion industry thought models were supposed to look. Prior to Twiggy, British fashion models came from the upper classes and were slim but curvy, tall and elegant young adult women. This 16-year-old girl from working class London, who spoke with a Cockney accent, changed all that.
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Sadie Frost’s Twiggy is a great watch for fashion fans and, more specifically, Twiggy fans. I liked learning more about her and seeing that she was who I thought she was–funny, self-deprecating, and without airs. I feel like, to paraphrase one of the people interviewed for the film, that her genuine spirit is what helped catapult her to stardom. She might have been one of the world’s most iconic fashion models, but she still remembered her working class roots.
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I LOVED The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs. Sara Flores, and her fascinating blend of a calm presence and the sort of artistic genius rarely recognized in the art world would be enough to captivate me for the span of writer/directors Èlia Gaskell Balada and Matteo Norzi’s film. Add, though, the cinematography by Johan Carrasco, which balances the natural world that inspires Flores, with the plastic, glam world of capitalism and winner-take-all attitude ruled by brands like Dior. Those two perspectives really bring home the weight of Flores’s inspired artistry, which, in the span of the documentary, becomes more about activism and standing for her community that about art for its own sake.
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Tehran is one of the world’s busiest plastic surgery hubs. Like Brazil and the U.S., people — especially women — are clamouring for nose jobs, liposuction, breast lifts, facelifts and more. Filmmaker Afsaneh Salari seeks to understand what drives women to go under the knife by embedding herself and her crew in the offices of two plastic surgeons.Tehran, Under the Skin takes a fly-on-the-wall approach, basing the camera in waiting rooms with potential patients as they await consultations with two different surgeons. Women, especially young women, describe their perceived imperfections to a camera and an audience that sees the beauty they cannot. The director inserts herself into the film, as viewers hear her voice questioning the women about their surgeries. She captures moments between patients in the waiting room, commenting on and complimenting others’ beauty. The mood is light; the women are hopeful and excited about what new looks await them.
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