Kathryn Bigelow is finally getting her due, thanks to a career comeback in the form of Zero Dark Thirty and the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. The writer-director is more than overdue on having critical praise heaped upon her, what with Bigelow already having made cult vampire flick Near Dark way back in the eighties, along with a little rom-com called Point Break. Probably the pinnacle of her early career, however, was Strange Days. A mix of dystopian sci-fi, millennium fear and the recent LA riots, the film stars Ralph Fiennes playing against type as a weasley criminal in a Hawaiian shirt who, in the near future, sells black market memories that can be played on a virtual reality headset. Theyre not just virtual reality, though: you feel everything from the memory too. So mainly he sells sexy ones. Then he finds himself in possession of one where crooked cops kill a young black man, and has to run from the law. Its a high-concept, high-pay-off sci-fi thriller with a dynamite cast of Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis. Essential.