The question of whether women write from a unique perspective has been debated since the silent era. McCreadie examines how this female sensibility has been defined and whether, in fact, it exists at all. Such films as "Lost in Translation" and "Monster" suggest that women screenwriters are moving in a new direction, heading away from the big-budget action movies that dominate Hollywood today. But action-driven genre films, like the thrillers of Alexandra Seros, seem to belie the perception that women write films that are more dialogue- and character-driven than those of male...

This collection of film reviews and essays focuses on the role of women in films during the 1970s and 1980s. The author, a widely published film critic, examines the shifting portrayals of women from the almost anti-progressive treatment of women in the early 1970s through the integration of more progressive professional women in the films of the late 1980s. She shows that most of the important movies of the period were about women and that these films seemed to reflect the momentous changes that women were going through in the society at large. McCreadie's in-depth analysis of women in...