The Hurt Locker

The 13th Annual Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards, presented by Starz, have announced that director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Near Dark, Strange Days) will be honored with the "Hollywood Director Award."

Kathryn Bigelow recently directed the The Hurt Locker, a film that has received great acclaim. It stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie in a riveting portrait of three members of the Army's elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad battling insurgents in Iraq. Bigelow's remarkable work has alternated between edgy and art-house fare (The Loveless, Near Dark, The Weight of Water) and action products (Point Break, Strange Days, K-19: The Widowmaker) throughout a highly regarded career spanning more than 25 years...

The Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival , Oct 1-12 2009, has an impressive female-directed lineup this year!

The Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival , Oct 1-12 2009, has an impressive female-directed lineup this year!

Sci-fi/comedy Cold Souls (Sophie Bartes), historical horror The Countess (Julie Delpy), creepy drama Ne te Retourne Pas (Marina de Van), action war movie The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), serial killer documentary Cropsey (Barbara Brancaccio with Joshua Zeman), surrealist horror Amer (Hélène Cattet with Bruno Forzani), and animated fantasy The Secret of Kells (Nora Twomey with Tomm Moore.)

Grace, the hororr film by Scary Studs Paul Solet (February 2007) and Adam Green (August 2007), also makes an appearance. Watch the trailers for the films below...

Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow's horror/western vampire action film comes to Blu-ray for the first time from Lionsgate on November 10th! Who knew Lionsgate owned it???. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), the film stars Bill Paxton and Adrian Pasdar.

Actor Anthony Mackie asked his wife to FedEx his dignity back to him. The inexperienced Jordanian crew gave the actors real liquor for a fight scene (which wasn’t discovered until well into the shooting, thanks to the actors). And temperatures soared sometimes above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite that, and shooting one million feet of film, director Kathryn Bigelow’s new action film The Hurt Locker, out June 26th, 2009 in theaters, is an awesome display of intensity and fireworks (read our review). Director Bigelow (Near Dark, Strange Days) and screenwriter writer Mark Boals talk to Pretty/Scary about working with actor Jeremy Renner on the newest action movie about the Iraq War and the men who diffuse bombs in the streets of Baghdad...

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
Featuring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pierce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly, Christian Camargo, Christopher Sayegh, and David Morse
Release Date: June 26th, 2009

Kathryn Bigelow wows the film universe by yet again doing the unthinkable: directing an action movie with as much entertainment value as any man. She’s defied these laws of sexual physics before, with inexplicable gender-of-director-ambiguity in sci-fi Strange Days, thrillers Point Break and Blue Steel, and the Eric Red action vampire horror western Near Dark. Film fans, horror fans, and action movie buffs alike all love Bigelow. She, like Gale Ann Hurd, graduated from the James Cameron School of Filmmaking, and her latest film The Hurt Locker is an action war movie of which Michael Bay should be jealous. Explosions? Check. Automatic gun stuff? Check. Guys doing guy things? Check. All that’s missing is the cheesy one-liners, lack of believable character development, and a few slutty women and it might even be mistaken for a movie directed by a man...