When Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break was released in 1991, it marked the arrival of a radical new voice in action cinema. Here was an adrenalised film about cops and robbers, centred on the intensely emotional bond between two men on either side of the law, that so happened to be directed by a woman. “It’s not just about breaking gender roles,” the film-maker said in a 2009 interview. “It’s to explore and push the medium.”
Throughout her career, Bigelow has routinely operated in genres primarily occupied by men – perhaps most famously with her Iraq war film The Hurt Locker, which made her the first woman to win a directing Oscar. But just a few years before the macho melodrama of Point Break, Bigelow had already taken a scalpel to the action film in her wonderfully sleazy Blue Steel, a deceptively subversive, female-fronted thriller that investigates the thorny conflation of power and gender in the male-dominated cop genre.
