Blue Steel (1990)

I like Kathryn Bigelow's gripping Blue Steel about a rookie cop who just 24 hours into the job blasts away a supermarket robber, has her badge taken away and ends up the object of a gun-fetishist's psychopathy, and I like it so much I've watched it three times now, but full of awful policework and characters' really dumb decisions, it is best considered a slice of throwaway psychosexual horror (with horror stalwart Jamie Lee Curtis really just terrorised by another nightmarish Michael or Fog) than a more meaningful thriller/drama - there's nothing intelligent said, for instance, about gun violence or female cops or male violence.

★★★☆☆

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Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

This is an undeniably rivetting account of the hunt and execution of Osama Bin Laden, but it is also chilling in its depiction of war games in which the cost of a life is rationalised.

★★★★☆

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