Summary

• Ana Lily Amirpour has created a unique and compelling body of work with feature films, short films, music videos, and TV episodes.
• Her films often explore themes of the macabre and the weird, with stylish and sensory storytelling that requires multiple viewings.
• From her critically acclaimed debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night to the more recent Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Amirpour continues to push boundaries in filmmaking.

Iranian American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour now has three feature-length films under her belt and each one offers up something unique and compelling for the audience. Amirpour is one of the woefully few female directors currently working in Hollywood, but since her debut in 2016 with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, she has continued to gain recognition, making the movies she wants to make with in-demand actors. Audiences and critics alike seem to appreciate her stylish and sensory films that often require more than one viewing to really absorb.

Feature-length movies aren't the only productions Amirpour has directed. She also has a significant body of television, short film, and music video work. Amirpour has directed eight short films, music videos for Christina Aguilera and Tini and Juanita and the Rabbit, several episodes of notable TV shows, including Legion, Castle Rock, The Twilight Zone, and a segment of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. Amirpour has a fascination with the macabre and the weird ,and her feature films allow her to explore those themes in a longer format that her TV projects don't allow.

3 Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon (2021)

A Stylish And Creative Fantasy That Ends Too Soon

In Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, a woman with telekinetic powers, Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo), escapes from a psychiatric hospital and wanders the streets of New Orleans. She runs into an exotic dancer named Bonnie Belle (Kate Hudson) who is the only person to treat her with kindness. Thinking she may have found a home, Mona Lisa quickly realizes Bonnie is exploiting her for her powers, using her to rob people and ATMs.

The film has a 74% on Rotten Tomatoes and features the stylish and lurid plotting and types of characters that Amirpour has previously been successful with. Jeon in particular, is great as a woman unsure of her powers, and the actor plays her hopefulness, desperation, and cold detachment well. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon does end too quickly, however, and feels a bit more like one of Amirpour's horror TV episodes in terms of narrative heft.

2 The Bad Batch (2016)

An Ensemble Cast Including Jim Carrey & Keanu Reeves Elevates The Plot

While The Bad Batch may only have a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes, its trippy, psychedelic Western setting; unique, dystopian, dreamlike feel; and all-star cast including Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Suki Waterhouse, and Jason Momoa in one of his best performances, make it a greater feat than the sum of its parts.

In the film, Arlen (Waterhouse) is exiled to Texas in the post-apocalyptic near future where she is attacked by a group of cannibals led by Miami Man (Momoa), only to escape and find refuge in a strange village led by The Dream (Reeves).

Though the plot does feel too stretched out, an example of Amirpour's continued issues with pacing, the visuals, characters, and stylistic choices are so unique that they make getting through the slower parts of the film much less of a slog. Amirpour creates a festival of different visual styles between the dusty villages of the desert and the rave-like Comfort city where Arlen finds reprieve.

1 A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

A Stylistic Iranian Vampire Tale