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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The Portrait review – knotty psychodrama with a dark, menacing power

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Despite the odd cliche, a thriller with an unnerving picture at its core is coated with unsettling energy and a standout performance from Mexican actor Natalia Córdova-Buckley

Simon Ross’s capable debut can be hung in a gallery of films featuring unnerving paintings, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Ghostbusters 2 and In the Mouth of Madness. Wife turned carer Sofia (Natalia Córdova-Buckley) stumbles across an uncanny canvas in the attic of the mansion to which she has brought her catatonic husband Alex (Ryan Kwanten); it is supposedly a self-portrait of his great-grandfather, but she is startled to find that it is a spitting image of Alex. While this gothic chestnut, and the psychodrama that follows – with Sofia unsure how much is the product of her own under-siege mind – feel familiar, Ross injects them with a troubling inner turbulence that bodes well for him.

Apparently a doting, endlessly patient spouse, Sofia hides a guilty secret: she was the one responsible for Alex’s brain injury in an accident during a marital tiff. She has brought him back to the family pile in the hope of reviving his memories, but their sojourn upturns the wrong kind of history. When Sofia inquires after the portrait, the glowering progenitor turns out to have been an irredeemably violent man. Holed up in the house with only occasional contact with well-spoken gardener Brookes (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and outre cousin Mags (Virginia Madsen), she begins feeling the eyes of her doppelganger husband weighing heavily on her.

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