Parallax View

Kathryn Bigelow has been making tough, rich, evocative movies for decades, too few in our estimation, and too often dismissed for the visceral, aggressive qualities that make them so compelling. Now, after leaving an unfulfilling relationship with Hollywood and going the independent route, she brought her uncompromising vision to the screen to the screen with [...]

[expanded from a review originally published on seanax.com, July 2009]
“Tell me something. What’s the best way to disarm one of these things?”
“The way you don’t die, sir.”
Set in the current Iraq war, after the proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” and the transformation of a battlefield army into an occupation force, The Hurt Locker follows the [...]

The Hurt Locker premiered in the one-two punch of the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2008 and then made the long march through subsequent film festivals until its theatrical release in June 2009. Director Kathryn Bigelow shepherded the film through each showing, giving [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 31, Number 5, September/October 1995]
Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 genre-juicing vampire film Near Dark opens close up on a leggy mosquito poised to tap into screen-spanning flesh. Apt epigraph for a film about heartland bloodsuckers; but also your ticket into any of the intensely sensual, romantically nihilistic excursions—The [...]

First things first: We’re not jumping on the Bigelow Bandwagon here. We’ve known from the beginning. We saw the promise in The Loveless and Blue Steel and the genius in Near Dark and Strange Days, defended Point Break and K-19: The Widowmaker against detractors who saw them as nothing more than [...]