91. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Directed by Woody Allen
Starring: Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Carrie Fisher

Woody Allen has a well-documented fascination with women. His films are usually scattered with interesting females, besieged by them in fact, and his penchant for sticking by his Actresses and getting them nominations (at least in the Supporting sense) is to be admired. This ability is epitomised none moreso than in his 1986 film, Hannah and Her Sisters, which sees a selection of Actresses (all of which probably deserved Oscars for this) navigate the murky waters of uncertain romance and sisterhood.

A lot of what makes Hannah so successful is that it won't really commit to telling any one story in particular, scanning a network of people without making each of their lives a separate, static representation of their personality, but a realisation of a constantly evolving family, whereby relationships aren't restricted or set in stone, and where sisterhood doesn't necessarily mean unconditional admiration or adulation. Each sister comes across as individual, but none of them have massive arcs to undergo or major hurdles to encounter, our view of them capable through their attitude towards each other, be it a hint of jealousy and resentment at a man's preference of one sister over the other, or an outraged reaction to literary truth.

Key to buying into this family's thinly-veiled and rather sad dynamic is the way that life is treated as so incidental; affairs happen matter-of-factly, and there's never any lingering impression of their lives as a drama. These sisters embody guilt, angst and contempt but aren't riddled with or defined by them. In theory, this family could so easily implode from within, but the nature of these women as unaware, the different perspectives that they have on life and the different roles that they fulfill, tell you that this is and always has been how things will operate.