Best Female Lead movies of 1972

Actors : Jüri Järvet, Natalya Bondarchuk, Vladislav Dvorzhetskiy, Donatas Banionis,
Directors : Andrei Tarkovsky,

A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.

Actors : Lucy Grantham, Fred J. Lincoln, Sandra Peabody, David Hess,
Directors : Wes Craven,

Two teenage girls head to a rock concert for one's birthday. While trying to score marijuana in the city, they are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of psychotic convicts.

Actors : Mink Stole, Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary,
Directors : John Waters,

Notorious Baltimore criminal and underground figure Divine goes up against a sleazy married couple who make a passionate attempt to humiliate her and seize her tabloid-given title as "The Filthiest Person Alive".

Actors : Barbara Hershey, Barry Primus, David Carradine, Bernie Casey,
Directors : Martin Scorsese,

During the Great Depression, a union leader and a young woman become criminals to exact revenge on the management of a railroad.

Actors : Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Kari Sylwan,
Directors : Ingmar Bergman,

When a woman dying of cancer in early twentieth-century Sweden is visited by her two sisters, long-repressed feelings between the siblings rise to the surface.

Actors : Margot Kidder, William Finley, Charles Durning, Jennifer Salt,
Directors : Brian De Palma,

A journalist witnesses a brutal murder in a neighboring apartment, but the police do not believe that the crime took place. With the help of a private detective, she seeks out the truth.

Actors : Peter Gonzales Falcon, Pia De Doses, Britta Barnes, Fiona Florence,
Directors : Federico Fellini,

A fluid, unconnected and sometimes chaotic procession of scenes detailing the various people and events of life in Italy's capital.

Actors : Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais, Rene Auberjonois, Susannah York,
Directors : Robert Altman,

Schizophrenic housewife, engulfed by terrorizing apparitions, kills off each, unknowing if these demons are merely figments of her hallucinatory imagination or part of reality.

Actors : Diana Ross, Richard Pryor, Billy Dee Williams, James T. Callahan,
Directors : Sidney J. Furie,

The story of the troubled life and career of the legendary Jazz singer, Billie Holiday.

Actors : Katrin Schaake, Eva Mattes, Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla,
Directors : Rainer Werner Fassbinder,

An arrogant fashion designer falls in love with an icy beauty who wants to be a model.

Actors : Adrienne Corri, Thorley Walters, John Moulder-Brown, Anthony Higgins,
Directors : Robert Young,

A village in Nineteenth Century Europe is at first relieved when a circus breaks through the quarantine to take the local's minds off the plague. But their troubles are only beginning as ...

Actors : Isabel Jewell, Jeff Briggs, Edie Sedgwick, Wesley Hayes,

CIAO! MANHATTAN parallels Andy Warhol Factory star Edie Sedgwick's glory days in the late 1960s through her inevitable downfall and the tragic addiction that would take her life only weeks after filming wrapped in 1971.

Actors : Candice Roman, Anitra Ford, Teda Bracci, Pam Grier,
Directors : Jack Hill,

Grier and Haig are thieving mercenaries who engineer a prison break from the outside.

Actors : Joanne Woodward, Nell Potts, Judith Lowry, Roberta Wallach,
Directors : Paul Newman,

From the Pullizer Prize winning play by Paul Zindel, this is the story of Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters, Ruth and Matilda. A middle-aged widowed eccentric, Beatrice is looking for ...

Actors : Ariane Heller, Barbra Streisand, Terry Smith, David Selby,
Directors : Irvin Kershner,

A bored housewife takes refuge in a fantasy world.

Actors : Claude Brasseur, Bernadette Lafont, Guy Marchand, Charles Denner,
Directors : François Truffaut,

Stanislas Previne is a young sociologist, preparing a thesis on criminal women. He meets in prison Camille Bliss to interview her. Camille is accused to have murdered her lover Arthur and ...

Actors : Renato Romano, Luigi Squarzina, Peter Baldwin, Gian Maria Volontè,
Directors : Francesco Rosi,

Enrico Mattei helped change Italy's future, first as freedom-fighter against the Nazis, then as an investor in methane gas through a public company, A.G.I.P., and ultimately as the head of ...

Actors : Louis Quinn, Betty Anne Rees, Claudia Jennings, Roberta Collins,
Directors : Vernon Zimmerman,

Karen wants more action out of life and quits her job at the cannery to become a skater in the roller derby. She encounters friction from the other skaters - especially Mickey, the current ...

Actors : Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Elizabeth Taylor, Beau Bridges,
Directors : Peter Ustinov,

The Faust legend retold (loosely) and applied to a mentally disturbed patient in a hospital run by a doctor of dubious sanity himself. The patient (Burton) offers the innocent orderly (...

Actors : Malgorzata Braunek, Iga Mayr, Maciej Englert, Michal Grudzinski,
Directors : Andrzej Zulawski,

During the Prussian army's invasion to Poland in 1793, a young Polish nobleman Jakub is saved from the imprisonment by a stranger who wants in return to obtain a list of Jakub's fellow ...