[1][2] Akerman is best known for her films Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and News from Home (1976).

She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville,[10] funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.

[11] Akerman then returned to Belgium, and in 1974 received critical recognition for her first fiction feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She), notable for its depiction of women's sexuality, a theme which would appear again in several of her films.

[11] Feminist and queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich believed that Je Tu Il Elle can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality".

[13] Akerman's most critically-acclaimed film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was released in 1975, and presents a largely real-time study of a middle-aged widow's routine of domestic chores and prostitution.

[20] Akerman engages with realist representations, a form historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman".

[23] In 2011, she joined the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production at the City College of New York as a distinguished lecturer and the first Michael & Irene Ross Visiting Professor of Film/Video & Jewish Studies.

[28] Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022.

[22] Curator Jon Davies writes that her domestic interiors "conceal gendered labour and violence, secrecy and shame, where traumas both large and small unfold with few if any witnesses".

[22] Akerman addresses the voyeurism that is always present within cinematic discourse by often playing a character within her films, placing herself on both sides of the camera simultaneously.

[22] Akerman cites Michael Snow as a structuralist inspiration, especially his film Wavelength, which is composed of a single shot of a photograph of a sea on a loft wall, with the camera slowly zooming in.

[22] Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace".

[32] Similarly, Akerman's visual language resists easy categorization and summarization: she creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development.

[18] Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.

[1] (I, You, He, She) (Meetings with Anna) (All Night Long) (American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy) 39th Berlin International Film Festival[38] 48th Venice International Film Festival (A Couch in New York) (Tomorrow We Move) (Almayer's Folly) (Blow Up My Town) (The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman) (The Room 1) (The Room 2) (The Man With the Suitcase) (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold) (Sloth) (The Hammer) (Moving In) (For Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador) (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels) (All the Boys and Girls of their Time...) (The Eighties) (One Day Pina Asked Me / On Tour with Pina Bausch) (Letter from a Filmmaker) (Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas) Media related to Chantal Akerman at Wikimedia Commons