41. Ree Dolly, Winter’s Bone (2010)

Like The Last Seduction, Winter’s Bone flips the script on noir mystery films and finds a new direction for appealing old tropes, but it takes a very different tack: Instead of focusing on the femme fatale, it ditches her altogether, and turns the gumshoe into a teenage girl. Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence in her breakout role) runs the household for her mentally ill mother and two younger siblings in the Ozark backwoods, keeping them clean and fed even in an environment of desperate poverty. When their survival depends on her tracking down their irresponsible absentee father, she goes about it just like Sam Spade would: asking uncomfortable questions, refusing to take no for an answer, and taking the occasional beating that shows she’s getting too close to the truth. Part of what makes Winter’s Bone memorable (besides Lawrence’s mesmerizing performance, and Debra Granik’s crisply chilly direction) is the way it plays on such familiar noir-mystery signifiers, while making them almost unrecognizably new. But the other half of the equation is Ree’s unusual blend of politeness and ferocity, as someone who hates asking anyone for anything swallows a certain amount of her pride to keep the rest of it intact. Based closely on Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Winter’s Bone offers a hero cinema has seen many times before—but not as a woman, let alone such a young, desperate, flinty one. [TR]

42. Alike, Pariah (2011)

It may be too soon to declare that we’re entering some kind of golden age of complex teenage girls on the big screen—maybe more like a bronze age, or a copper age—but the rise of films like Pariah and upcoming offerings like Diary Of A Teenage Girl and Fan Girl signal that the multiplex is becoming less preoccupied with the kind of glitzy, glammy teen stuff that dominated the 1990s, and might be opting for richer features that take the shine off the high-school experience. In Pariah, 17-year-old Alike has to navigate far beyond the typical realms of teenagehood, grappling with her burgeoning sexuality and her deeply disapproving mother, while also mucking through regular life. Her joys are deeply felt, her disappointments wounding, and she approaches her complications with an authenticity few characters ever approach, even in far more pleasant circumstances. As Alike struggles to be her best, most real self, she doesn’t realize she’s already there, deftly presenting her reality to the world, even if she (like her mother) isn’t ready to see it. [KE]

43. Martha, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

What happens at the end of Martha Marcy May Marlene? We could argue about it for hours, and that’s primarily thanks to an opaque but deeply felt performance from Elizabeth Olsen and a boldly enigmatic script from director Sean Durkin. Martha, a troubled young woman who’s recently escaped the clutches of a cult (or has she?), is unflinchingly strange, ignorant of social norms, and totally paranoid (or is she?), so much that she starts to frighten those around her. She gets in bed with her sister and brother-in-law while they’re having sex, she swims naked in broad daylight, she flies in and out of moods she can’t seem to control. The audience is primed to sympathize with her, but also to fear her unknowability—can we trust her? Can she trust herself? We never really find out, which is what makes the role and the film so haunting and compelling. Martha is a woman losing her grip on reality (…maybe), who’s fragmented, unmoored, and morally ambiguous, but who’s neither obviously punished for it nor redeemed. It’s a role that goes outside the usual character boundaries, not just for women, but for narrative film in general. [RH]

44. Lisa Cohen, Margaret (2011)

The salvation of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret stands as one of the great triumphs of critical advocacy, but even given the film’s tortured production history and the wounds apparent in its theatrical cut, the power of Anna Paquin’s performance as Lisa Cohen should have been self-evident. Lisa is a tempestuous 17-year-old New Yorker who witnesses a distracted bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) accidentally running over a pedestrian, and struggles over what to do. Does she tell the truth, condemning a blue-collar guy with a family to unemployment and possible prison time? Or does she lie to protect him? That decision is the moral fulcrum on which Lonergan’s ambitious coming-of-age story pivots, with Lisa representing youthful idealism and innocence, and the indulgence and self-involvement that goes along with it, too. Doing the right thing is important to Lisa—and difficult in the compromised world of adults, which frustrates and enrages her—but she frequently steps out of bounds. Lonergan and Paquin give her the fullest possible airing. [ST]

45. Mavis Gary, Young Adult (2011)

In an environment where filmmakers seem to struggle far more with making female characters relatable and irreproachable (and pretty from all angles, with a narrow idea of what that means) than they do with male characters, it’s still entirely refreshing to come across a female character as remorselessly petty and vindictive as Mavis in Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s black comedy Young Adult—and vanishingly rare to see such a character as a protagonist. Mavis is the star of her own story, in which she evaluates her life, finds it wanting, and decides to leave the big city (of Minneapolis, mind you) for her Minnesota hometown, where she plans to win back her high-school sweetheart by breaking up his marriage and persuading him to abandon his new child. Mavis is one of those rare cases that prove how desperately audiences want to identify with a lead character, regardless of awful intentions or awful behavior: Charlize Theron makes Mavis entertaining and appealing even when she’s acting abominably. But Reitman, Cody, and Theron are all way out on a limb with this story, which acts like a hilariously poisonous corrective to the schmaltzy tradition of “getting back to slow, fulfilling small-town life” movies, and embraces the most edgy and regrettably funny sides of cynicism. They’re all being daring just by never giving in to sentiment. But at the same time, they’re wickedly smart about what drives characters like Mavis, and how they affect everyone around them. [TR]

46. Frances Halladay, Frances Ha (2012)

Given that writer-director Noah Baumbach tends to make sour, cynical (albeit hilarious) comedies, odds are that the bulk of the credit for Frances Ha’s generous spirit belongs to its co-writer and star Greta Gerwig, who plays the heroine as scatterbrained but well-meaning. Baumbach and Gerwig don’t excuse their struggling young New York dancer Frances Halladay for being impulsive, sloppy, and presumptuous—not to mention certain that her inability to grow up and get her shit together is endearing to her eternally patient friends. But they also recognize that Frances has a good heart, and that her screw-ups don’t really hurt anyone but herself. Where a lot of modern popular culture either mocks urban hipsters or treats their quirks with annoying reverence, Frances Ha is more honest about this particular character’s strengths and weaknesses, and is more refreshingly optimistic about the future of Frances’ generation. [NM]

47. Maya, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Inspired by a real-life (and still anonymous) CIA agent, Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya personifies the conundrum of what constitutes heroism and bravery within the world of terrorism, particularly once torture is factored into the equation. Played by Jessica Chastain in an Oscar-nominated performance, Maya approaches the United States’ post-9/11 hunt for Osama bin Laden with a messianic fervor that spans a full decade, during which time she grapples with the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and how they function within a broader investigation that hits dead end after dead end. Over the course of Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Maya transitions from idealistic newcomer to hardened fanatic, the sort of woman who, in Bigelow’s own words, “we rarely see in motion pictures, one who is professional and dedicated, obsessive but not neurotic or sexually dysfunctional, a woman capable of mistakes in judgment and capable of crossing moral lines in the line of duty and yet utterly self-sacrificing and dutiful in the name of protecting the nation—in short, a fully human rendition of a civil servant, and a bundle of contradictions.” It’s a loaded, politicized role that asks viewers to parse moral questions and assumptions they may not be fully comfortable with, and Chastain engages with her difficult character head on, all while maintaining an authentic emotional core that surfaces in the film’s poignant, disquieting final moments. [GK]

48. Adèle, Blue Is The Warmest Color (2013)

Blue Is The Warmest Color made headlines for its more sensational aspects: It’s an electric, torrid lesbian romance; it’s three hours long; it includes a 10-minute sex scene between two women; its director, Abdellatif Kechiche, drove its two leads to tears and exhaustion on a regular basis. But it rests in the collective cultural memory as much more. It’s an unapologetically dramatic teenage love story that doesn’t over-romanticize or undercut its protagonists’ profound emotions. And it’s a sprawling, ambitious coming-of-age tale that marked the arrival of a fresh, promising new talent: Adèle Exarchopoulos, who won critics over with her take on Adèle, a malleable 15-year-old who falls madly in love with a woman and grapples with her sexual identity. What’s most remarkable about the role is that Adèle, a vulnerable, malleable teenage girl (i.e., Hollywood’s lowest-regarded demographic), is given the space and the respect to grow at her own pace, to enthusiastically gobble up plates of pasta, to lie unenthused beneath the enthusiastic machinations of one of her male suitors, to bury herself in novels, to experience her first orgasm, to stress about throwing the perfect dinner party for her lover—in other words, to be a fully realized, multi-faceted young woman, one who’s treated as deserving of 180-plus minutes of development. It shouldn’t be so rare to see a young woman’s narrative playing out so languidly, and with so much reverence and sensitivity. But it is. [RH]

49. “The woman,” Under The Skin (2013)

It’s never clear whether the unnamed alien “woman” in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel Under The Skin is actually female, of if “she” has just taken that form because it’s the easiest way to seduce lunkhead men into her deadly jelly-trap. Regardless, Scarlett Johansson’s performance—and Glazer and Walter Campbell’s script—do more with the heroine’s femininity than use it to portray her as a sexy monster. Under The Skin creates a sense of disorientation in the audience, showing what our world would look like from the perspective of someone extraterrestrial (or perhaps extra-dimensional… the creature’s origins are kept vague). But the film is also partly about Johansson’s character learning how to be a convincing human woman—by observing how other ladies dress and behave, and by figuring out how easily men can be captivated by someone who smiles at them and repeats whatever they say. It’s a twist on the old woman-as-mystery, woman-as-monster trope, one that thoughtfully examines what femininity means, and how it affects people of all genders, or none. [NM]

50. Amy Dunne, Gone Girl (2014)

Plans rule Amy Dunne’s world. Foisted into fame at a young age, as the muse for her parents’ wildly successful yet vaguely chiding kiddie-book series, Amy has always had an idea of what the future should look like (bright) and how she would get there (professional striving, a paid-for apartment, some kind of gallant gentleman). When her world is turned upside down, she reacts in the only way she knows how: By making a plan. Meticulous to the point of insanity, so clever it’s unnerving, coldly ruthless to a degree that’s endlessly surprising, Amy takes aim at her new future with laser-like focus. Unlike other scorned women, Amy isn’t driven by emotion—at least, not the kinds of emotion audiences would expect from someone in her situation. Instead, she latches on to a pragmatism that’s so crisp, it fails to recognize outcomes that don’t see her winning. By rejecting the expectations that have marred her life so far—the Cool Girl bit and all that—and embracing her (totally unsettling) abilities to get things done, Amy prevails. She’s an unrepentant anti-heroine for the ages. [KE]

Special note: This week’s podcast goes deeper into how we curated this list, what inspired it, what we were looking for when we assembled it, and our absolute personal favorites on the list. You can listen to it here, or look for The Dissolve Podcast on your favorite podcast platform.