Mark Kermode on… Kathryn Bigelow, a stylish ruffler of feathers

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From vampire noir to Bin Laden, Point Break to Detroit, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director has never pulled her punches Watching new Jeff Nichols release The Bikeriders , starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy as 60s Chicago greasers, I was reminded of two other movies: László Benedek’s 1953 Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One , explicitly cited as an inspiration, and The Loveless , the 1981 feature debut of Kathryn Bigelow , the American film-maker (b.1951) who would go on to become the first woman to win a best director Oscar with her 2008 war drama The Hurt Locker . A symphony of leather-clad posing (with just a touch of Kenneth Anger ), The Loveless was a staple of the late-night circuit in the 80s, often on a double bill with David Lynch’s Eraserhead . Sharing directing credits with Monty Montgomery, Bigelow playfully deconstructed masculinity and machismo in a manner that was one part wry to two parts relish. I remember seeing The Loveless at the Phoenix in East
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My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock review – Mark Cousins’ cheeky and insightful study

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In this critically agile film, Hitchcock supposedly narrates from beyond the grave, using movie clips to reveal techniques and meanings in his work

Only a cinephile as passionate as Mark Cousins could have got away with this film, in all its hilarious presumption and cheek. It is a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s work, illustrated with clips chosen with tremendous insight and connoisseurship – and supposedly narrated from beyond the grave by Hitchcock himself, pointing out techniques, resonances, images, meanings and occasionally breaking off to check something with Cousins who will answer, off-mic: “Yes Mr Hitchcock.”

However, the script is Cousins’ own and the master himself is faked by the comic Alistair McGowan, whose vocal impersonation is just so eerily good that after a while I thought Cousins really had made this by sitting alone in some darkened Edwardian parlour with his tape recorder and Ouija board. But of course the voice is pure Cousins – which is to say, marvellously well-informed and critically agile. (He did something similar with his film The Eyes of Orson Welles, in which Welles (voiced by Jack Klaff) is imagined to have written a supportively nice letter to Cousins. It is also possible he was influenced here by the Hitchcock doppelganger mashup movie Double Take by Tom McCarthy and Johan Grimonprez. As I say, with anyone else, this kind of insouciant appropriation would be jarring. With Cousins you buy it, though there is some naivety, of which more in a moment.

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