In the fifteen years since I founded Noirvember, the collective interest in film noir has increased exponentially. Personally, I don’t care if people think it’s a genre, an era or a mood—I’m just excited to see what they’re watching and discovering each year. My friend and colleague Eddie Muller, host of TCM’s Noir Alley and president of the Film Noir Foundation, puts it best: “Film noir is suffering with style.”

With that criteria in mind, this year I’ve put together a list of twenty films directed by women from all across the globe and spanning several decades that I think are perfect examples of this definition.

While many of the films made during the classic era were directed by men, women crime writers like Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary and Patricia Highsmith—and screenwriters like Ketti Frings, Pamela Mason and Janet Green—paved the way for women to make their mark on the page. A handful of women filmmakers, like Edith Carlmar in Norway, Muriel Box in the UK, and Ida Lupino in the United States, found success directing noir in this era as well. By the 1980s and 1990s, the stylized sleaze of noir, thanks in large part to the popularity of the erotic thriller, had made a huge comeback—just as the number of women stepping behind the camera was on the rise.

A few years back here on Journal, I highlighted a handful of neo-noir pictures by trailblazing filmmakers like Jane Campion, Maggie Greenwald and Kasi Lemmons, so for the sake of this starter pack, I am going to leave off modern-day essentials like In the Cut and Blow the Man Down in favor of some off-the-beaten-path picks that run the gamut in setting from 1940s Norway to 1990s Chicago, and push at the boundaries of what can be labeled noir.

Death Is a Caress (1949)

Noir is filled with its fair share of bad romances. One of my favorites also happens to be the first Norwegian film directed by a woman. The story centers on a passionate and ill-fated tryst between a working-class mechanic (Claus Wiese) and a society woman (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen). Unlike in America, censorship in Norway was minimal, which allowed Carlmar to depict much more sexually explicit scenes. To this point, Alice notes the filmmaker’s “wealth of visual imagination,” discussing a scene in which “the lovers’ faces dissolve into an uncorked champagne bottle, its bubbles surging down its neck like semen.”

Streetwalker (1951)

Pioneering Mexican filmmaker Matilde Landeta’s third feature blends heightened melodrama with a noir plot to guide viewers into the dark underworld of pimps, cabarets and sex workers. The film follows two sisters—Elena (Miroslava Stern), who finds herself in the comfortable realm of wealth and respectability, and Maria (Elda Peralta), who falls into the exploitative world of the streets—and what happens when their lives collide after a period of estrangement. LoveLaughMovies finds it to be a “profound piece of melodrama as a medium,” adding that it is “such a bold showcase of patriarchy and how women cannot really escape from it no matter on which side of the coin they are.”

The Teckman Mystery (1954)

British actress-and-dancer-turned-director Wendy Toye won awards at Cannes and was even nominated for an Oscar for her early short films. By the 1950s, she was one of the few women directing features in England. Adapted from a BBC TV serial, this noirish thriller follows a writer (John Justin) who falls in love with the sister (Margaret Leighton) of the test pilot whose mysterious death he is investigating, pulling them both deeper into a web of death and intrigue. Nannina praises the film for its “twists and turns, humor and carefully ratcheted tension,” adding that “Wendy Toye has a dancer’s gift for timing and movement, and a great eye for an interesting shot.”

Eyewitness (1956)

Directed by the Academy Award–winning Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female director, and written by Janet Green—who would later write the scripts for Basil Dearden’s powerful social-issue noirs Victim and Sapphire—this thriller follows Lucy Church (Muriel Pavlow), who, after a fight with her husband about his unnecessary spending, heads to the local cinema to blow off some steam, only to find herself an eyewitness to a robbery. Fleeing the scene, she’s hit by a bus and stalked by the robbers. Within this rote plot, Sakana notes that Eyewitness casts “its eye upon subjects as diverse as marriage as an institution, the refusal of a patriarchal society to believe women who say inconvenient things, the ways in which men exert their power.”

Hideout in the Sun (1960)

Okay, you got me: this film, co-directed by the great Doris Wishman and Larry Wolk, is in fact a nudie-cutie filmed at a nudist camp in Florida. But what I love about Wishman is that she often married her sexploitation romps with genre tropes in order to craft something so singularly hers. Here we have brothers Duke (Greg Conrad) and Steve (Earl Bauer) who rob a bank then kidnap a woman named Dorothy (Dolores Carlos) in order to hide out in the members-only nudist camp where she is employed. However, things don’t go as planned when Steve falls hard for Dorothy… and the nudist lifestyle. As Liz points out, this could have just been a documentary that espouses the joys of nudism, but instead Wishman “gives us a crime thriller with actual characters and an absurd, snake-filled climax that kind of has a Biblical subtext.”

Strange Days (1995)

Co-written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, Kathryn Bigelow’s searing conspiracy thriller–tech-noir bottles the bubbling tensions and fears surrounding the impending millennium and blends them with sci-fi and film noir conventions to examine our country’s rotting core rooted in racism, abuse of power, sexual assault and voyeurism. Set in the waning days of 1999 where Los Angeles is now a war zone, Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, a former LAPD officer who now sells illegal virtual reality—like recordings that implant the emotions and past experiences of others into its users. When Lenny finds himself caught up in a murder, he turns to Mace (Angela Bassett), a bodyguard and limo driver, for help. Potent in its prescience, Babis writes, “Kathryn Bigelow built an entire world that’s somehow more believable than our own—sweaty, chaotic, racist, over-surveilled, addicted to itself. It’s not just cyberpunk; it’s prophecy.”

Bound (1996)

Inspired by the noir films of Billy Wilder, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s sexy and slick debut—a sapphic erotic crime thriller—stars Gina Gershon as Corky, an ex-con hired to renovate a Chicago apartment, who gets in over her head when she falls hard for Violet (Jennifer Tilly), who lives next door with her boyfriend, a paranoid mobster named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). Travis calls it “classic noir filmmaking so erotic and thrilling that it achieves a charged, lipstick-smeared ecstacy (aesthetic, cinematic, fucking libidinal) equal to that of its screenmelting lovers angling to rob the mob.” Stef agrees, writing, “Every time I rewatch this, I think ‘Damn, it must feel so good to be the coolest movie ever made.’”

Gaudi Afternoon (2001)

Based on a detective novel by Barbara Wilson, Susan Seidelman’s playfully queer noir caper stars Judy Davis as Cassandra, an expatriate American book translator living in Barcelona whose life is turned upside down when a mysterious woman (Marcia Gay Harden) hires her to find her missing husband. BluCthulhu praises Seidelman’s ease within the genre, insisting she “skillfully employs film noir tropes just as readily as [she] subverts them.” Expounding on the film’s trans themes, Drew writes, “Sometimes the best trans representation from twenty+ years ago is a beautiful cis woman playing us and the joke being how confused a cis person is by the trans woman’s full and complicated life. Delightful!”

Winter’s Bone (2010)

Coming-of-age meets rural noir in Debra Granik’s Oscar-nominated film, which features a daring performance from Jennifer Lawrence. “A masterpiece of tension, of what’s not said saying everything, of the look, the pause, of doing what you have to do,” according to FeloniousTongue. Lawrence stars as Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old girl fighting against the local criminal underworld to save the house she shares with her younger siblings after her father puts it up for his bail bond and then disappears. Bewitching performances from John Hawkes and Dale Dickey add a thick layer of dread to this Ozark-set noir.

Señorita (2011)

Written by, directed by and starring Isabel Sandoval, this rural political noir follows Donna, a transgender sex worker in Manila, who moves back to her small hometown in the hopes of rekindling her relationship with her child, only to find herself caught up in the drama of a local election with aims of unseating a corrupt mayor… who also happens to be her client. It’s the rare film to feature a femme fatale as the lead, with Sandoval bringing her signature complex interiority to the role. Sandra also praises it as a “story about transfeminity while also being an intriguing neo-noir political thriller, making it genuinely one of the most confident debut films I’ve ever seen.”

Night Moves (2013)

This thriller follows two radical environmentalists (Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning) who plot with an ex-Marine (Peter Sarsgaard) to blow up a hydroelectric dam they believe is actively harming the environment. When a man drowns in the ensuing flood, the nerves of their fragile group begin to fray. A dark commentary on our seemingly hopeless fight against climate change, Luke calls it “one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen; every frame of this is soaked in dread and paranoia.” As she does in her most recent film, The Mastermind, director Kelly Reichardt uses genre tropes to examine modernity, or, as Yui puts it, she uses the thriller structure to “interrogate the expedient and fleeting dreams of individuals and their individualism, this naive idea that you want to destroy the way things are, yet also return to your normal routine the day after, not affected by your own behavior.”

You Were Never Really Here (2017)

Winner of the Best Screenplay and Best Actor awards at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames is one of the grimmest films I’ve ever seen. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe, a traumatized veteran who tracks down missing girls for a living. He soon finds himself at the heart of a child trafficking conspiracy involving a high-level politician. Contrasting it with the vigilante-laden superhero films that smash box office records, Steve notes that Ramsay’s picture “doesn’t deconstruct this vigilantism as much as completely decimate any romantic preconceptions of it with a ball-peen hammer. Everything about Joaquin Phoenix’s tortured torturer Joe is cranked up to eleven as he wanders through a surreal nightmare, followed by his trauma, in search of retribution.”

Little Woods (2018)

Another chilling rural noir, Nia DaCosta’s feature-film debut uses both noir and western tropes to explore the pitfalls of America’s broken medical system and its deadly opioid crisis. Little Woods stars Tessa Thompson as Ollie, a woman living in a North Dakota oil boomtown hoping to start a new life after her probation ends. When her sister (Lily James) comes to her with a desperate plea, she finds herself dragged back into her old life, which includes illicitly sneaking residents across the border to receive Canadian health care. Fatima finds it to be “a layered, harsh landscape of a film to explore, one that rightly villainizes American capitalism over the drug users and dealers it leaves in its wake.”

The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)

Based on the novel of the same name by Joan Didion, Dee Rees’ paranoid political thriller is a slow-burn character study of a woman torn between duty and family, drowning her self-loathing in alcohol, work and danger. After covering the Salvadoran Civil War years earlier, investigative journalist Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway) is now on the 1984 US presidential campaign trail when her estranged father (Willem Dafoe) asks for her help delivering an arms shipment to Costa Rica. MJ asserts that “everyone is wrong on this one. Purposeful incoherence reflects unsure spy work done by an untrained reporter.” Dean agrees, declaring it a “great, softly surreal political thriller about empire, liberalism and the end of democracy in America, if you let it be.”

I’m Your Woman (2020)

Set in the late 1970s, Julia Hart’s old-fashioned crime flick stars Rachel Brosnahan as Jean, the infertile wife of a professional thief named Eddie (Bill Heck), who is involved with organized crime. Shortly after he procures a baby for her to raise, Jean is forced to leave her suburban enclave and go on the run in the big city when Eddie mysteriously goes missing. Praising its “stripped-down storytelling and slow-burn tension and suspense,” Dawson calls it “a wonderful tribute to—and subversion of—the classic neo-noir crime thrillers of the 1970s, but from a decidedly (and very much welcome) female point of view.”

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020)

Operating in the minor key of blackout noir, Lili Horvát’s romantic drama follows Márta, a 40-year-old Hungarian neurosurgeon living in America who falls in love with a colleague from her home country at a conference in New Jersey. When their plans to meet at the Liberty Bridge in Budapest ends with heartache after he claims they’ve never met before, Márta begins to question the nature of her own reality. Ellis argues that “it contains throwbacks to Vertigo on the one hand and Brief Encounter on the other,” adding that “you’re never quite sure which it’s moving towards; until the very end, it manages to evade categorization and defy genre.”