After seeing a couple great movies directed by people better known as actors, I started to think about this. How often does it really happen? There’s plenty of actors who have tried their hand at directing, such as Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp and Bill Paxton, to mixed results, but one would think there are benefits to coming up through the acting pipeline.

For one, if you are making a movie with a lot of emphasis on drama and acting, it is beneficial to understand what the actors actually need in those situations to perform optimally. There might be more of a common language between them.

On the other hand, it is possible that you would emphasize what you know too much and leave the rest out of your process or just assume that the HoDs know what they are doing (which they do, but they would still need guidance on what to do, even if they know how to do it).

So, who is a star, anyway? Some of these are not household names. I bet my grandma (both of whom are dead) wouldn’t know anyone except one. Is that guy a star? Yes. What about the rest of them? They have had starring roles in movies I’ve actually seen and that’s enough for me in this specific case. I wouldn’t accept that criteria anywhere else.

Whatever the case, here’s 10 movies that I like very much in a reverse chronological order. Why reverse? because I wanted to put the two aforementioned movies that motivated this first.

Zoe Kravitz – Blink Twice (2024)

She has been Catwoman in two different versions of Batman, The Batman and, before that, The Lego Batman Movie. She was also one of the wives saved by Furiosa in Fury Road and Angel Salvatore in First Class among many other roles.

She does appear in her own movie, but its more like a Hitchcockian cameo as she is a stewardess (or more precisely “swanky stewardess”) in a short private plane sequence. Hitchcock being an apt reference here as he tried to use his power to force the women working for her to do him sexual favors. This is how Tippi Hedren’s career pretty much ended after Birds. The movie is about how rich men abuse their power, although there is a high-concept approach to it.

The story is about a woman, who manages to meet a billionaire at a show, which gets her and her friend an invitation to a private island with the said billionaire and his friends. Turns out that not everything is as it seems.

Anna Kendrick – Woman of the Hour (2023)

She had a two decade acting career before moving into directing. She might be better known for Pitch Perfects and the Twilights, but I’ll always remember her from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as Scott’s exasperated sister. Her directorial debut came out last year in the festival circuit and received a release this year on Netflix, but also in theaters at least in Europe.

This is based on a real life story of Dating Game where one of the contestants was actually a serial killer. The movie makes interesting choices regarding how to approach the victims as they are always a touchy subject in any kind of real crime media.

Sarah Polley – Women Talking (2022)

I know Polley from an early role in Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I guess she might be known for the Dawn of the Dead remake as well, but as she was a kid in the first one and an adult in the second, you might not realize it was the same person. She moved into directing and some point, but I might as well mention her book Run Into Danger as well, because it is an interesting read about her career. It is not strictly an autobiography, but all the essays in the book are autobiographical.

This is a great movie about a religious community that is facing a crisis as they realize that some of the men have been drugging and raping the women. So, while the men are out trying to get the authorities to free the arrested men, the women get together to decide what they should do now. This is based on a real event, but only tangentially. The discussions are an interesting look at how to approach these kinds of topics in a community such as this.

Greta Gerwig – Little Women (2019)

Gerwig was widely known as an indie darling actor. However, it should be noted that she has been writing movies for roughly the same amount of time. Still, she has now directed three movies and each of them has been nominated for the Oscar for best movie. That’s unheard of. While she might be best known for Barbie, a movie I do like, I just like this one better.

This version of Little Women is the seventh film adaptation of the book (and there’s also a bunch of TV adaptations), but this is the best one I’ve seen. I especially like the angle of Jo selling her works, which are the basis of the book. Sure, nothing like that probably happened, but I still like it. Just a little bit of feminist wishful thinking.

Olivia Wilde – Booksmart (2019)

Best known, probably, for multiple seasons of House as Thirteen, the team member who never got a real name. Besides that, she has had a varied career. Her second movie was a disaster on multiple levels (and I haven’t seen it, but according to IMDb, it is now the thing she is mostly known for), but her first one was great.

Booksmart is about two high school students, who find out that their focus on academic achievement has stopped them from having fun, but hasn’t gained them anything as many of their classmates are still going to similarly big name colleges. So, the pair decide that they are going to take back the lost time in one night. Everything goes pretty much as expected, but the ride is fun.

Jordan Peele – Get Out (2017)

This is a movie that reached Sight & Sound’s Critics’ Poll a couple of years ago after only five years since its release. That is phenomenal from multiple points of view as there aren’t many horror movies or movies by black directors on the list either.

For me, Peele was the least famous of all the people on the list before moving into directing, but that might be because he mostly worked in television and I have never seen a full episode of that show.

This is a very interesting high-concept movie about a black man dating a white woman. The problem is that the very liberal parents of the woman have a very specific understanding of life as a black person and thus they have started to move the consciousness of their family members and friends into black bodies which they see as superior.

Clint Eastwood – Unforgiven (1992)

Does Clint Eastwood need any kind of an introduction? Well, I’m going to give you one anyhow. In his early career, he starred in Rawhide, a long-running Western TV show which he made over 200 episodes of. At first, he had trouble shedding that image having made the Dollar Trilogy with Sergio Leone, so he started to direct in the early 70s. His latest film just came out 53 years later (and he wasn’t exactly young in the early 70s either). While he managed to get past his typecasting to an extent, he never really fully shed the cowboy image. So, he was kind of the perfect person to make this movie, which earned nine Oscar nominations with four wins, including Best Movie and Best Director.

It’s about aging killers in the old west, who had attempted to leave the life behind, but get pulled back in. Much of the movie is about how the myth and reality of the west differ, but there’s still elements of the myth here as for example the costuming is very inspired by Leone’s movie rather than what people actually wore.

Rob Reiner – Princess Bride (1987)

Rob Reiner was best known for his role in All in the Family in the 70s, where he played Meathead, the son in law the main character never liked. As the son of Carl Reiner, he was pushed into a career in an entertainment career from a very young age, but when he got into directing in he started great. His first movie was This Is Spinal Tap, which was the beginning of a series of movies often considered classics stretching to 1992s A Few Good Men, including this one.

I like to note whenever talking about the Princess Bride that there was a time when it was considered laughable trash. Of course, the mood on this has changed and now this is a beloved movie on a level where I don’t see much of a point in even explaining this. It is just a fun story with fun character played by people in exactly the right roles (well, most of them).

Charles Laughton – Night of the Hunter (1955)

Charles Laughton was a classic Shakespearean actor, having studied at RADA and performed on stage for quite a while before moving to films. I remember him best from A Witness for the Prosecution and Spartacus. He won one Oscar and received two other nominations for his work. Then, he made this one film, which is a true classic. Weird that he never directed another.

Night of the Hunter is about two kids, trying to escape from their stepfather who is looking to force them into telling him where their deceased criminal father hid money he stole. Robert Mitchum is great in his role as the stepfather who pretends to be a preacher, but has the original and often copied LOVE/HATE tattoos on his knuckles. This is a film noir, but has a very different setting from most films noir as it happens in the countryside.

Ida Lupino – The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Ida Lupino might not be a household name now, but there was time a time when Ida Lupino was the only female director in Hollywood. She started that work in the late 40s after almost two decades of acting, sometimes starring in big movies such as High Sierra. I have seen some of her films. They are mostly very low-budget “message movies” as they were known back in the day, you know, a movie that is not supposed to only entertain, but also has a very obvious message. These were often quite heavy-handed, like the other three movies I’ve seen from her: The Bigamist, which is about a man feeling guilty for bigamy, Not Wanted, in which a young woman gives up her out-of-wedlock baby, but then tries to steal another to fill the hole, and Never Fear, which is about living with polio (which Lupino herself had contracted in the 30s).

The Hitch-Hiker is very different from these. It is often considered the first film noir directed by a woman and it’s about a couple of friends who pick up a hitch-hiker, who happens to be a serial killer on the run. He tells them he will kill them both when they get where he is going.

It is an intense movie in a way movies from this period often couldn’t achieve. While it is low-budget it doesn’t look like it the way her other movies do and there is clearly a lot of thought put into the story and how the assailant keeps his victims docile.