Martel directed a number of short films between 1988 and 1994. The award winning short film Rey Muerto (Dead King) (1995) was part of Historias Breves I (Brief Tales I).
According to film critic Joel Poblete, who writes for Mabuse, a cinema magazine, Lucrecia Martel is one of the members of the so-called "New Argentine Cinema" which began c. 1998.
Her debut feature film La Ciénaga received several international awards, and was voted the greatest Latin American film of the decade in a poll of New York area film critics, programmers and industry professionals. The Holy Girl was selected for competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and ranked ninth in the same poll, while The Headless Woman was selected for competition at Cannes in 2008 and ranked eighth. Additionally, James Quandt of Artforum declared The Headless Woman as "one of the great films of the decade."
Martel was a member of the Cannes Film Festival Feature Films Jury in 2006.
In 2017 Zama premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. Martel's last work is an adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto's eponymous novel starring Daniel Giménez Cacho. The film received widespread acclaim from critics and was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.
