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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Strays review – Will Ferrell leads brutally funny comedy of foul-mouthed talking dogs

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With turns from Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, this barking stoner caper follows a neglected animal plotting revenge on a beastly owner

The cute talking pigs of the Babe films taught audiences to love real animals with CGI human-talking mouths; I myself was always agnostic, finding them lacking in both the unadorned charm of live-action animals and the complete ingenuity of animations. But this brutally funny stoner comedy about four pottymouthed stray dogs on an incredible quest has changed my mind. You’ll believe a dog can talk – and be extremely abusive.

Writer-producer Dan Perrault, known chiefly for his true-crime docu-spoof American Vandal, and director, Josh Greenbaum, have created a cheerfully offensive comedy about stray dogs trekking across America, with their own issues around abuse, abandonment and emotional PTSD as well as who to hump and when. I like to think they were inspired by the much-loved 1963 live-action Disney classic The Incredible Journey about the English bull terrier, yellow labrador and Siamese cat that trek 300 miles across the Canadian wilderness to get home. In the Disney film, however, none of the animals were in jail, trying to extend their prodigious genitals through the cell bars in a nailbiting quest to unhook the keys.

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