Before the days of her Academy Award-winning wartime true stories and her pivot to historical and political thrillers, Kathryn Bigelow got her start making textured genre films that have become cult classics. Her first film, The Loveless, was a volatile drama about a biker gang that helped bring Willem Dafoe to prominence, but her second movie, Near Dark, was what really put her on the map – a Gothic horror Western mashup about a family of nomadic vampires in small-town Oklahoma. Of course, one can’t talk about early Kathryn Bigelow without talking about what is debatably her most lasting impact, the homoerotic extreme-sports thrills of cult-classic heist movie Point Break.
Four years after the release of Point Break, Bigelow released a film that flopped so hard it almost ended her career, and ironically enough, it was co-written by James Cameron, fresh off the success of T2: Judgement Day as well as the couple’s recent divorce. Strange Days, a 1995 cyberpunk neo-noir set at the turn of the new millennium, grossed only $17 million on a budget of $42 million. Critics at the time were flummoxed by the high-concept convolution of its story and Bigelow’s unflinching depiction of horrors inflicted against women. In the 31 years since its release, however, it has gone on to amass a dedicated cult following who have championed it as a prophetic and incisive piece of political commentary – and after several years of physical media inaccessibility and dodgy availability on streaming, it has now landed on Disney+ and Hulu in its correct aspect ratio.
