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.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
