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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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 10 – Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

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This whimsical, lovable movie features cinema’s bromance of the year – between a human and a seashell as the latter goes looking for his family
• More on the best films of 2023
• More on the best culture of 2023

The movies are going through a phase in which franchised or generic material – or anything at all – is becoming ever more soullessly produced as “content”. And yet there is at the same time a reaction, a yearning for something real and organic in the movies, something with the handcrafted imperfection and waywardness that can’t be nurtured in the corporate environment. A kind of “real ale” movement. Superhero movies are beginning to pall and Pixar animations are starting to seem too programmatic.

This wildly popular stop-motion animation is the ultimate beneficiary of this new hunger: Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate’s film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is so airy, so tiny, so eccentric, so exotic, that it appears to break every rule of instant relatability. It whimsically avoids the easy grasp and the elevator pitch. Even the title is baffling and forgettable – are the first and third words supposed to rhyme? – requiring two or three repetitions before it can be committed to memory.

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