The uncontested tentpole attraction of this pandemic winter, Wonder Woman 1984 is finally out on non-premium VOD and DVD from Monday. Most DC franchise fans have doubtless checked it out already, and got the kicks they wanted. Patty Jenkins’s long, busy follow-up to her 2017 smash has slightly less to offer casual viewers, though for the lockdown-fatigued it’s a suitably distracting spectacle of many moving parts.

The follow-up was always going to struggle to live up to the largely delighted reception afforded its predecessor (on Amazon Prime), which, as the first female-led entry in a culture-consuming rise of superhero blockbusters, was so overdue as to be genuinely rousing in its arrival. A sequel could only be more pro forma by comparison. But it seals the place of Gal Gadot’s unbreakable, retro-styled Diana Prince in the firmament of cinema’s female action heroes: a literally otherworldly presence in a club otherwise dominated by women of a more mortally badass nature.

That the Wonder Woman films, for all their own bubblegum merits, qualify as any kind of milestone at all is a poor reflection on an industry that still often treats female-driven action cinema as a subgenre – with a canon that remains largely unchallenged. Practically any list of great action heroines will end with Ellen Ripley at the top. They should, given how, from 1979 to 1997, Sigourney Weaver’s bracingly tough space warrior blazed a trail in the Alien films (on Chili) for a kind of character that Hollywood studios had never previously written for women: a potential horror victim who kicks and thrashes and resists her way into active protagonist status.

Without her, we’d probably never have had Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor emerge as the true hero of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Amazon), poaching the film out from under its Schwarzenegger-slathered marketing. Charlize Theron’s career owes much to Weaver’s, even if she took the unusual route of cultivating Oscar-winning dramatic prestige before emerging as her generation’s most battle-ready actress. She nails the breathlessly choreographed combat spectacles of Atomic Blonde (Microsoft Store), while in Mad Max: Fury Road (Now TV), her steely, shaven-headed Furiosa repeated the Connor manoeuvre, taking ownership of the film from its male title character.

Quentin Tarantino gave us the low-key action cool of Pam Grier’s eponymous Jackie Brown (Now TV) and the delirious cartoon vengeance of Uma Thurman’s hell-bent Bride in the Kill Bill films (Now TV again), though his B-movie influences predate Alien. Indeed, Grier’s own blend of camp and grit in such 1970s blaxploitation shoot-’em-ups as Foxy Brown (iTunes) deserves more credit than it usually gets for shaping the modern action woman.

The mainstream, meanwhile, has been slow to give black women space in the genre. Angela Bassett’s resolute bodyguard Mace in Kathryn Bigelow’s ahead-of-its-time sci-fi stunner Strange Days (Chili) should be less of an anomaly. Similarly, even the massive US success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Now TV) didn’t inspire Hollywood to build blockbusters around the breathtaking athleticism of stars such as Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, though Asian cinema continued to do so. Zhang’s star turn years later in House of Flying Daggers (Google Play) serves up the most painterly ass-kicking action in film history.

It’s often world cinema – from Luc Besson’s still-spiky Nikita (iTunes) to Sebastian Schipper’s exhausting one-take whirlwind Victoria (Curzon Home Cinema) – that gives female protagonists their gutsiest action workouts. But American cinema can spring the odd surprise within the genre too: such unlikely figures as Meryl Streep (in The River Wild, on Amazon Prime) and a reedy teenage Saoirse Ronan (in Hanna, on Chili and ageing better by the year) have got the chance to flex their muscles in the face of daunting odds. Finally, an action heroine has never been more real, more honestly nervy than Gena Rowlands’s gun-wielding, on-the-lam moll in John Cassavetes’s Gloria (Google Play), and she’s all the more formidable for it. Not all wonder women wear capes, after all.

Also new on streaming and DVD

Chinese Cinema Season
(chinesefilm.uk)
The inaugural edition of what should hopefully be an annual streaming event, this online festival of Chinese film old and new kicked off in February to mark the lunar new year celebrations, and continues until 12 May. The selection runs the gamut from recent domestic commercial smashes (such as airborne action thriller The Captain) to a retrospective of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio to a selection of career highlights from unpredictable arthouse auteur Lou Ye. It’s a good chance to bone up on a national cinema that still gets limited international exposure.

Bombay Rose
(Netflix)
Storytelling isn’t the selling point of this debut from Indian animator Gitanjali Rao – a time-tangling romance set on the streets of Mumbai – but its hand-painted visuals will draw you in. Awash in earthy pinks and saturated jewel tones, mixing traditional animation techniques with sleeker forms, it’s an unusual triumph of vision and craftsmanship.

The Glorias
(Sky Cinema)
Julie Taymor’s fussy film-making sensibility seems an odd fit for a biopic of no-bullshit feminist icon Gloria Steinem, and so it proves in this ungainly, overstuffed but not uninteresting film, which braids four actors’ interpretations of Steinem at different ages. Taymor throws any number of tricks and techniques at the wall, though the film’s own political consciousness is a bit thin.

Quo Vadis, Aida?
(Amazon/iTunes/Curzon Home Cinema)
Oscar and Bafta nominations should hopefully bring more attention to Jasmila Žbanić’s shattering drama based on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre – out on all main VOD outlets next week. Driven by Jasna Đuričić’s sterling performance as a UN interpreter caught in the maelstrom, it superbly merges intimate fiction with vast historical reenactment.