An old-school coldwar nuclear sub thriller based on a true story from 1961, with Harrison Ford as the icily authoritarian Soviet commander busting out his Ryushhhyan acksyent. Liam Neeson plays his second-in-command, resentful at having this cold fish imposed over his head and yet destined to respect the guy. Some slightly clunky traditional moments for our two leading males, but also a few exciting ones.
Cerebral drama … Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley in The Weight of Water. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
At the time, this cerebral and multilayered psychological drama was sympathetically received as Kathryn Bigelow’s (possibly permanent) pivot to arthouse-type film-making and away from the high-impact action genre. Catherine McCormack plays a journalist researching the 19th-century murders of Norwegian immigrants, who notices an eerie parallel between a witness to these slayings and herself. An interesting, worthwhile film, though maybe a bit weighty and watery. Audiences would later come to see that, for Bigelow, action was the real artistry.
This is a head-trippy dystopian thriller with a touch of modish millennial angst, co-written by Bigelow’s formerpartner James Cameron; the elements of virtual reality chime with the industry’s enduring reverence for Philip K Dick and the film arguably anticipates the debate on AI. In 1999, LA is a futuristic, lawless hellhole, and winsomely creepy Ralph Fiennes plays a black-marketeer whose immersive sensory tech allows his customers to experience other people’s thrills, including those of violent crime. Bold and lively, technically sensational but maybe a bit overwrought and even clumsy.
Generations of moviegoers now associate this title with fashion model Derek Zoolander and his most compellingly sexy yet complex facial expression. But Bigelow was there first with this film, co-produced by Oliver Stone , showing the steel of a courageous woman in blue: gutsy rookie cop Megan Turner, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. She accidentally kills a criminal whose gun is stolen at the crime scene by a psychopath – this man then embarks on an obsessive affair with Megan, who doesn’t realise how their paths have crossed. The audacity and sheer hardboiled craziness of this movie have won it a place in the hearts of the Bigelow and Curtis fans.
Tension and thrills … Zero Dark Thirty. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Bigelow’s punchy war-on-terror procedural thriller took on the US special forces’ mission to apprehend, or rather assassinate, al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who they discovered was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan – with the soldiers nail-bitingly beginning their raid at half past midnight or “zero dark thirty”. Some tension and thrills, undoubtedly, although as the film was releasedmore than a decade after 9/11, critics wondered if any more perspective could have been shone on proceedings. There was also the contentious point about whether usable intel was obtained through CIA torture, a topic that elicited Amy Poehler’s classic line about the film at the Golden Globes: “When it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.”
6. Near Dark (1987)
In her solo directing debut, Bigelow stunned Hollywood with her appetite (and talent) for gonzo mayhem – and gave audiences a neo-vampire freakout that anticipated Abel Ferrara’s own nihilist use of that trope. It was considerably darker and less romantic than the Twilight tales that gripped the industry a generation later. A nervy young cowboy makes out with a mysterious, attractive young woman who, after a playful neck bite, introduces him to her friends – a feral group of undead outlaws who must decide if this newcomer is worthy of being inducted into the gang.
A bold, muscular movie … Detroit. Photograph: Album/Alamy
A tough, fierce, socially engaged picture on which Bigelow worked with her longtime screenwriter Mark Boal. This was about the Algiers Motel murders, a police-brutality incident that took place during Detroit’s 12th Street riot in 1967. It brought the fraught history of racism into parallel with an episode of musical history – the early career of the soul group the Dramatics. John Boyega plays Melvin Dismukes, a black security guard who wanted to support the police on a night of disorder but became the intimate and disenchanted witness to white officers’ paranoid racism. And, alongside that, the Dramatics find that their debut concert is cancelled because of the riot, but are then called to a recording session that night. A bold, muscular movie.
This was Bigelow’s first directorial outing, a joint credit with producer and David Lynch associate Monty Montgomery. It’s an outlaw biker movie that has something of The Wild One or a John Ford western to it, or indeed her later vampire movie Near Dark. The intense young Willem Dafoe plays biker badguy Vance who has a passionate affair with a teenage girl (played by Marin Kanter). Her rage-filled dad intervenes, but it soon becomes clear that this girl has an emotional history that Vance does not appreciate and he is going to be used as a weapon in his new girlfriend’s campaign of vengeance and self-harm.
Cult masterpiece … Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break. Photograph: Album/Alamy
The generic strangeness and uniqueness of Point Break is what makes it a cult masterpiece: an action bromance that is a heist movie … but also a surf movie. (And the surfers are charismatic outlaws like the bikers in The Loveless and vampires in Near Dark.) Keanu Reeves is the dedicated young FBI man with the unimprovable name of Johnny Utah, investigating bank robberies by a gang called the Ex-Presidents (four guys wearing Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson masks). From the culprits’ tan lines, visible on CCTV, and traces of surfboard wax recovered at the scene, he deduces that the robbers are surfers who steal cash to finance their addiction to surfing and other thrill-seeking activities. (Isn’t bank robbing thrilling enough?) So Keanu infiltrates a surfer gang led by the charismatic Patrick Swayze and, in time-honoured undercover style, finds himself falling under the criminal’s spell.
Bigelow detonates a megaton action blast with this brutal nuclear Armageddon thriller, closer in spirit to Sidney Lumet’s grim Fail Safe than the satire of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The world’s final 18 minutes before a nuclear missile hits a major American city is replayed four times from the viewpoints of various high-ranking people – finally, that of the stunned and helpless president, played by Idris Elba. The disorientation and unthinkable horror are refined and amplified with each reiteration, with particular emphasis on the high-spending incompetence and mendacity of the military-industrial complex that took the US taxpayer for billions of dollars to no effect.
Superbly bleak … Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. Photograph: First Light Production/Allstar
Bigelow’s blazingly powerful The Hurt Locker was the nearest Hollywood came to a compelling anti-war movie about the retaliatory campaign that followed 9/11. It is about the long, painful, futile endgame in Iraq, asymmetric warfare in which the enemy cannot be engaged in any meaningful sense. Military patrols go round and round in the desert, and endure an almost existential wait to be killed by an IED. Jeremy Renner made his name playing the scary Staff Sergeant William James, a bomb disposal officer who, driven mad by the sheer fatal emptiness of what they are doing, has chosen to disable bombs himself, rather than using robots that can be remotely piloted into the danger zone, and often even refuses to use protective safety gear. Is he simply mad? Or does he want to mainline the craziness of war into his veins. Or does he, in some even more poignant sense, want to reclaim the honour of a soldier’s death in combat? A superbly bleak film that also – as ever with Bigelow – delivers A-grade action and thrills.