Well, the sad truth is that most women (not all) look best in flat, frontal light, usually slightly high (above the lens) and the camera at eye level or slightly higher. Look at magazine covers of women and notice how frontal and shadowless the lighting is.
So the challenge for moviemakers is to somehow be flattering to women without always just softly front-lighting them -- although it may be unavoidable, especially since many actresses know how they want to be lit. Look at the new trailer for "Rumor Has It" and see how flatly-lit some of the actresses are.
There are many ways of lighting that way, and they all produce subtle differences. Some people will arm a Chimera-covered lamp over the lens; some will hang a Chinese Lantern over the lens. Sometime people prefer a harder key light, the idea being that it's still so frontal that it won't look too harsh -- for example, you can arm a 2K Zip Softlite over the lens, or a diffused tweenie or even a hard Dedo light mounted right on top of the lens. The opposite approach to a harder light over the lens is a super-soft, shadowless light, like by surrounding the camera with a wall of white cards and bouncing into them.
DP David Watkin explained once about lighting women is that getting rid of wrinkles is not a matter of lens diffusion, it's a matter of the key light not producing a drop-shadow, a black line, when it hits the wrinkle, so the light has to be very frontal, or very soft and mostly frontal.
But some faces need a little bit of modelling, like from a slightly higher, harder frontal key light -- the "Marlene Deitrich" lighting that Von Sternberg / Lee Garmes developed for her.
And some faces, assuming they have smooth skin, actually look better if softly side-lit, for example, because it makes their face look more narrow, less round. On the other hand, an overly narrow face may look better in a more frontal key.
And some faces really do have a good and bad side due to a certain lack of symmetry in their faces.
One method of getting away with a frontal key and keeping some mood is in a darker scene where the person is in a strong backlight, as if from the sun shining through a window, but their face is underexposed -- but softly flat-lit. So even though the face is flat-lit, it's darker and surrounded by an intense backlight that provides some contrast and sharpness. Or you can somewhat overexpose a front-lit face against a dark background and use the surrounding blackness to add contrast. Hence why a shot of a front-lit women in a black evening dress can look really good, because the light is flat but there is still a lot of contrast in the frame.
