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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Role Play review – action comedy wastes Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo

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A competent yet boringly unoriginal caper sees a married couple forced into action when the wife’s secret job as an assassin comes to light

Rather like the studio horror movie, the bar for the action comedy has lowered so dramatically that the mere act of not tripping over it headfirst is now considered enough. Modeled after an old-fashioned, something-for-him and something-for-her date-night formula, they tend to involve attractive stars smugly quipping at each other while sleekly avoiding pop-soundtracked gunfire, all theoretically allowing for the opportunity to show off dual personas, class clown and jock rolled into one.

But the magic that was on display in 2005’s magnetic Mr & Mrs Smith, a film that has arguably had the most visible, and damaging, impact on the genre in the almost two decades since (itself heavily in debt to 1994’s True Lies), has been almost entirely absent in its many imitators. Last year’s hauntingly awful Chris Evans-Ana de Armas starrer Ghosted acted as an almost instructive what-not-to-do, a punishing, unintentional parody of what these films have become in a year when there seemed to be more of them than ever before. To kick off the new year with yet another – male-female pairing: check, one of them is a spy/assassin: check – is not the most thrilling prospect but with many, many more to come in the next 12 months (Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz in Back in Action, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy, Donald Glover’s Mr & Mrs Smith TV series), it’s about finding the silver lining where possible.

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