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Kathryn Bigelow is a world-renowned filmmaking talent and one of the most established directors in Hollywood. Her name carries as much weight in conversations regarding the greatest living virtuoso action directors, as it does in awards-worthy discussions about the finest cinematic dramatists of our time.
But while her legend looms large, Bigelow’s filmography, which spans a nearly fifty-year career, is comparatively slim when looked at next to some of her filmmaking contemporaries. The Point Break director sets a high personal bar for herself in every new film she makes, and her choices as a storyteller have become increasingly motivated by her urgent, topical, socio-political concerns as an artist.
The Weight of Water (2000)
Bigelow’s 2000 murder mystery thriller finds its way to the bottom of this list with a 34% critical rating. The romantic and sexual tension between Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn is palpable, and the scenes that take place on the open sea during a cataclysmic storm, are sufficiently hair-raising.
In the end, the movie’s fatal flaw is that it doesn’t particularly accel in any of the ways that the best Bigelow projects do, making it fairly inert by comparison. The Weight of Wateris by no means a terrible movie, just a below-average one by Bigelow standards.
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
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K-19: The Widowmaker is one of the most salient examples of an exceptionally talented group of people, with a reliably entertaining formula for a story, coming together to make something that is decidedly less than the sum of its parts. With her reputation as a dynamic action filmmaker solidified by 2002, Bigelow was able to significantly increase her budget and hire iconic performers like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson to star in this Soviet submarine saga.
Some of the movie’s dramatic scenes are also somewhat undermined by Harrison Ford’s, and at times even Liam Neeson’s, clearly strained attempts at capturing an authentic Soviet accent. This historical submarine drama currently sits at a middling 60% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Strange Days (1995)
Strange Days is thematically, visually, and culturally, a product of its time. An idea originally developed by Bigelow’s former husband, James Cameron, the futuristic sci-fi noir story feels like it came from the same mind that created the Terminator, but its direction feels unmistakably native to Bigelow’s perspective.
The film was notably, a complete failure at the box office, and its poor financial performance actually resulted in a major setback for Bigelow’s career in Hollywood. In retrospect, the movie is still a cinematic and stylistic feat. Plus, seeing world-class thespians like Ralph Fiennes and Angela Basset wear leather, shoot big guns, and scream about the imminent doom of the world is a real treat.
Point Break (1991)
What can be said of the ultimate 1990s ode to surfing, heists, and male bonding that has not already been said? The reputation and general aura around Point Break transcends the film itself and made a cultural impact that one assumes Bigelow could have ever imagined for it. Although it has a relatively humble 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, this movie’s ubiquitous reputation speaks for itself.
Part of the film’s timeless legacy is wrapped up in the elegiac, tragic quality of watching a virile Patrick Swayze performing in his prime, shortly before his untimely demise. Heist films are a genre, and a narrative structure, that Bigelow was born to work in. Hopefully, she will return to them someday!
Blue Steel (1990)
Blue Steel is a taut, action-packed piece of pulp fiction, with a feminist edge. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a cop, who on her first day on the job, shoots and kills an attempted robber. On top of that already hairy situation, she goes on to become romantically involved with a witness, and possible perpetrator, from the scene of the crime. This hard-knock cop story has a healthy 73% approval rating.
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The movie was Curtis’ first chance as a performer to be a convincingly badass heroine, the kind of role she was born to inhabit. Blue Steel remains an incredibly effective thriller, that paved the way for many female-led action movies that followed it. It also functions as a complementary counterpoint to Bigelow’s follow-up crime classic Point Break, which she made a year later in 1991.
The Loveless (1983)
The Loveless was Bigelow’s first big-screen directing credit, and the first project that put her on the map as an independent filmmaking talent to look out for in the early 80s. Bigelow gave a young Willem Dafoe his first starring role in this independent biker crime drama, which nearly forty years later, has a respectable 73% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Loveless is a slightly campy, surprisingly funny cult classic that is even more fascinating to watch now, knowing the kind of filmmaker Bigelow would go on to become, and how much of her identity was already intact this early on in her career.
Near Dark (1987)
With a solid 87% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the blood-soaked, nocturnal tale of love, savagery, and Vampiric indoctrination under the Texas moonlight, Near Dark is Bigelow’s definitive contribution to the genres of fantasy and horror. This vampire drama was her sophomore effort after 1981’s The Loveless. After a six-year hiatus, Bigelow returned to the big screen with a beautifully stylized, romantic horror story with some truly shocking sequences of bravura filmmaking in it.
Near Dark features the great Bill Paxton delivering one of his finest supporting performances alongside fellow James Cameron/Kathryn Bigelow collaboratorLance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein of Aliensfame. The infamous bar scene, where the roving gang of vampires descends upon the inhabitants of a podunk dive bar, is still arguably the greatest single scene in any Bigelow movie.
Detroit (2017)
Detroit is a film with a generous 82% on the Tomato meter. In this claustrophobic historical drama, Bigelow endeavored to recreate and dramatize the infamous Algiers Hotel Incident, in which a squad of white Detroit city riot officers, murdered and tortured an innocent group of black civilians during the 12th Street Riot in 1967. The film stars John Boyega and Will Poulter among others.
Detroit is the last feature-length film that Bigelow has directed, at least until she completes her expected adaptation of David Koepp’s novel Aurora for Netflix, set to release sometime in 2023.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
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Bigelow’s second attempt at utilizing her hyper-intense, on-the-ground action filmmaking style, to create an unflinching depiction of war in the twenty-first century. The majority of Zero Dark Thirty is spent in offices, conference rooms, and aircraft carrier bases, rather than in the height of combat. The film follows the true story of a small group of CIA agents, spearheaded by Jessica Chastain‘s Maya Harris, over the course of a decade in the aftermath of 9/11, as they attempt to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
The climactic raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound stacks up against any modern action filmmaking accomplishment and was one of the few, true “hold your breath until it’s over” moments in theaters from the last decade. Zero Dark Thirty currently sits with an impressive 91% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film that won Bigelow her first Best Picture Oscar as well as made her the first female filmmaker to win Best Director at the Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker lands at the number one spot on this list with a 97% critical rating. The movie forces the viewer into the first-person perspective of a group of soldiers (played by Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie), perhaps more effectively than any other war film ever made.
Bigelow, being a master of both suspense and cinematic violence, was uniquely suited to bringing the physical and emotional realities of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq to life. Rarely does a film dealing with a subject that is this grave and this mired in political controversy, manage to rise above its storytelling specifics to make an undeniably gripping cinematic experience in a theater. Bigelow used all of her accumulated tools of filmmaking, to situate the viewer directly in the hellish, heart-pounding nightmare of modern warfare.
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