Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.