Trained as a painter and hailing from the elite art scene of 1970s New York, Kathryn Bigelow instead became a Hollywood maverick who embraced populist genre cinema. If her 1980s and early 1990s titles focused on the intoxicating allure of screen violence, or the threat of it, complete with seductive images and edgy attitudes, her later 21st-century films tackle social, historic and political topics in closer to realist terms. This switch, this reinvention, gives her filmography a bisected quality. The throughline lies in a consistent ability to craft gripping stories and heart-pounding, action-orientated sequences across genres and subject matter.
On being a woman in a male-dominated industry, Bigelow once said, paraphrasing poet Getrude Stein, “A filmmaker is a filmmaker is a filmmaker,” and “Action is action.” But then she also said: “A woman can handle something perceived as masculine, but then you have to ask yourself, why is it perceived as masculine?”…
