Streaming: Proxima and the rise of female astronaut movies

Eva Green's career-best performance as a single-mother astronaut is an ideal launchpad for a look at cosmic adventurers from Jane Fonda to Juliette Binoche

For too long in the movies - as in life - space exploration was presented as a boy's realm: brave, lantern-jawed men soaring off to the final frontier while their wives waited and fretted on terra firma. A recent spate of films and TV series have redressed the balance, putting women at the centre of their stargazing narratives - few more stirringly than Proxima (multiple platforms), a superb astronaut character study from the French director Alice Winocour that gives Eva Green the role of her career.

Proxima got a UK cinema release in July, but amid pandemic uncertainty never found the audience it deserved. Now, VOD should serve as a reintroduction to a film that combines compelling space-station activity with a frank, straightforward feminist message. Green plays Sarah, an ambitious astronaut and single mother surprised to receive a last-minute invitation to join a European Space Agency mission to Mars - the realisation of a lifelong dream, but one that necessitates a year spent apart from her eight-year-old daughter Stella (the delightful Zelie Boulant).