The Bechdel test — which deems that in a film or TV show, there must be two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men — has become popular shorthand for gauging gender imbalance in films. But it isn't always a good litmus for how 'feminist' a film is.
If you take the rules literally, Suicide Squad, which is almost aggressively misogynistic, can pass on a technicality. Similarly, if you don't take into account the content or length of the conversation, one of the movies in the Transformers franchise, which has been criticised for its objectification of female characters, can pass with a two-line conversation about how pretty Megan Fox is.
Meanwhile, there are films with feminist themes and a fleshed-out female lead that don't pass. The fact that we don't see women interacting with each other about something other than men in Mulan and Run Lola Run doesn't detract from these films' importance as feminist texts.
The Bechdel test also doesn't account for an increasing push for intersectionality. Films that both pass the Bechdel and engage with feminist themes can still run into representation issues. Atomic Blonde passes the Bechdel and then proceeds to (spoiler alert) kill its one lesbian character off in accordance with the dreaded Bury Your Gays trope. Ghost in the Shell was called out for whitewashing when Scarlett Johansson was cast for an originally Japanese character.
Trans women are often cast in the media as undesirable and trans women of colour in particular are killed by intimate partners at disproportionate rates. So on the TV show Doubt, it was a big deal that one of Lavern Cox's character's (pictured, right) main storylines was a romance with a man who had never dated a trans person before. On the fourth episode, there is a one minute scene where Cox's character talks to two trans friends about dating as a trans woman. That scene wouldn't technically pass the Bechdel test, but it was historic for trans representation.
It's clear that blanket rules about what is 'feminist' won't work for every facet of identity. To try to fill the gaps left by the Bechdel test, there have been variations that account for race, sexual orientation and a more nuanced version of gender roles. There is the Mako Mori test in which one female character needs to have her own arc not related to a man's story. There's also the 'racial' Bechdel