New Zealander Jane Campion is perhaps the most successful of this quintet. Campion has fierce confidence in the raw material of her own imagination, which is a realm as fertile as a rain forest, as perplexing as a force of nature.

In Sweetie and The Piano, her narratives break many of the structural rules, but still manage to pay off dramatically. Sweetie, a tale of two very strange sisters as opposite as speed and valium, is one of the oddest films you're ever likely to see. The movie twists the definition of normal sibling relationships, sex, and the nuclear family. In the process it plays havoc with our cinematic expectations. Even the frame is radicalized: overhead shots trap characters in comers, the camera crops faces in half, the tempting elements of a composition lie just outside the screen's reach.

In The Piano, Campion brilliantly uses the New Zealand jungle, its prehistoric flora and the Maori people as a metaphor for the intense, primal passions her characters grapple with. This is a movie about sex as an elemental force. When Holly Hunter sheds her black frock and beds down with Harvey Keitel, you can sense a shift in the natural order of things.

Campion's women are concerned with finding their place in the world. They are in search of their voices. In Sweetie, it's the title character's misguided notion that she has the talent to entertain; in The Piano, it's Ada's music; in An Angel At My Table, it's Janet Frame's brilliant writing.

An Angel At My Table is adapted from Frame's autobiographies. A celebrated New Zealand writer/poet, she spent eight years in a mental hospital after being misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. Campion has imbued the character with her deep compassion for women who follow their inner compass, rather than society's rules. It is a moving film, not as oblique as Sweetie, nor as tragic as The Maw, but equally engrossing, with the deft symbolism that marks all of her work.

Holland uses an odd close-up, a throwaway phrase, a haunting image, to build her films slowly. Time, and the things we do to fill it, are as crucial to her stories as the climaxes. Even in her claustrophobic early work, Angry Harvest, there is an accumulation of desperation, a sense of people trapped by circumstance who are moved to self-discovery and sacrifice

Europa Europa, over simplified, is about a boy trying to take a really good piss. The film is best in the scenes where the kid - a Jewish teenager hiding out in Hitler's army-attempts to reverse the deadly giveaway of his circumcision. Its triumphant final scene - he pees in a field - mirrors the exhilaration of Mary and her friends in The Secret Garden after they've restored life to her uncle's moribund estate

Holland, Campion, and Brooklyn's Nancy Savoca like to play their narrative cards in the order you least expect. The unhurried pace of their films, economical in detail and nuance, is a refreshing change from the bland frenzy associated with many male directors. They trust their audience to discover the small miracles in their stories

Household Saints sneaks up on you in more discomfiting ways. Just when you think you've got the movie pegged as a pangenerational tale of Italian-American working class families, it mutates into a strange parable about a daughter's suicidal, religious obsession. Only in the film's final frame do things connect. By then it may be too late, but you admire Savoca for gutting it out

Her best film, and most straightforward, is her first, True Love, with Annabella Sciorra as a woman about to get married to a guy who wants to spend his wedding night with his buddies. Savoca explores the complexities that exist even in relationships between people who aren't that complex to begin with. There is an abundance of truth in this film, never watered down, and delivered with a zing.

Savoca shares with Campion and Holland a respect for the men in her movies. Male directors who specialize in "boy movies," and even many who attempt films about male/female relationships always find ways to condescend to their female characters. If women aren't sexual props then they're story props, one-dimensional cutouts with cardboard flavored personalities.

In Australian Gillian Armstrong's The Last Days of Chez Nous, the most engaging character is the husband (Bruno Ganz), who maintains our sympathy even though he has an affair with his wife's sister. And in Mrs. Soffel, Mel Gibson delivers the only three dimensional role of his career as a prisoner on the lam with Diane Keaton

Armstrong's films are beautiful to look at, but they sometime miss the verve that Holland's and Campion's work possesses. Her Little Women, despite its popularity, lacks an edge. The March family is a passive bunch, thoroughly and contentedly polite. But Armstrong portrays women as strong and tormented as the worlds in which they live. Judy Davis in both High Tide and My Brilliant Career, Keaton in Mrs. Soffel and Kerry Fox in The Last Days of Chez Nous are women who break convention

Bigelow's first movie is a plotless biker film, The Loveless, in which her cinematic eye treats leather, chrome and Willem Dafoe's naked rear-end with equal erotic affection. Next is Near Dark, a tense vampire pic set in a rural white-trash milieu. Bigelow's fondness for over stylization and hard light got die best of her on her next film, Blue Steel, about a cop ferreting out a mysterious serial killer. The movie's action is flat and pretentious. But Bigelow got back in the boys' locker room and kicked it into overdrive with Point Break, a rocket of a film about bank robbing surfers. Bigelow's camera is on some kind of Benzedrine rush; one long camera track near the start of the film puts similar, celebrated moves in The Player and Touch of Evil to shame.

Bigelow, Campion, Armstrong, Savoca and Holland would no doubt rebel against being ghettoized as "women" directors. But their sensitivity, compassion and intelligence sets their work apart. MM