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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From Ferrari to The Iron Claw: this season’s Oscarbait movies that missed

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While Oppenheimer, Poor Things and Barbie made an impression with voters, there were other big bets that didn’t quite pay off

While last year’s strikes led some films to be pushed off the schedule, when the Oscar race fully came into view, it felt as competitive as any other year, if not more. The summer success of Barbenheimer meant that we had two early frontrunners, a rarity given how the industry usually backloads its prestige bets, and with Cannes giving us three more, after Sundance already gave us one, there was little room for others to break through.

Here are this season’s also-rans:

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