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Ahead of the release of Detroit, a look at the earlier work of the Oscar-winning director

In Zero Dark Thirty, staring Jessica Chastain, director Kathryn Bigelow crafted a thriller about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Whenever discussing Kathryn Bigelow, writers are careful to put a caveat toward the beginning, almost as if an official subtitle to her career: Kathryn Bigelow, The Only Woman to Win an Oscar for Best Director. This is not meant to decry such a deserved distinction, only to bemoan the fact that the culture is in such a stasis that this personal history seems like an immovable biographical detail – it is a weight that Bigelow is obligated to carry around for the rest of her professional life, or until the industry finally wakes up and realizes it has been ignoring so many other talented artists for so very long.

With that complaint out of the way, what else do we talk about when we talk about Kathryn Bigelow? Her filmography is a fascinatingly varied one, both in how it mirrors what Hollywood prefers its artists to make and what those artists actually have in mind. Bigelow's genre thrillers are crass and seductive and cheap in their obligatory thrills, but underneath, her aesthetic is laced with an anarchic spirit.

Her war films are big and loud and tense, but political enough to spark threats of United States Senate committees. Bigelow's work is singular, and will stand the test of time no matter the action or inaction of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and others.

To mark the Aug. 4 release of Detroit, the California-born director's first feature in five years, the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto is screening all but two of Bigelow's films (and most in 35mm) over the course of the summer. Last week, audiences got a chance to revisit the delirious highs of Bigelow's Near Dark (the movie Robert Rodriguez has been trying to make his entire life), Point Break (a glorious prototype for the Fast and Furious franchise) and Strange Days (an admirably scummy dystopia that anticipated Silicon Valley's current obsession with making virtual reality a going concern). Here, a rundown of the rest of the filmmaker's singular work.

Blue Steel (1990)
A blunt critique of gender imbalance dressed up as a stalker thriller, Blue Steel is an intense, ambitious genre exercise that doesn't quite achieve its lofty goals. But Bigelow does wring a distressing amount of tension from its thin plot, and corrals a rash of fantastic performances from Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver and Clancy Brown. (Plus, it's chock full of great bit parts for character actors Tom Sizemore, Elizabeth Pena and Kevin Dunn.) Screens July 28.

K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
By the time Bigelow reached the submarine-in-peril genre, audiences had already been treated to such classics of the form in Das Boot, Crimson Tide and The Hunt for Red October. Instead of reinventing the wheel (or, er, the sub valve? Listen, I've obviously never been under more than two feet of water), Bigelow pushed the genre further into its natural element of high tension and extreme claustrophobia. Unfortunately, she was saddled with a grumpy Harrison Ford performance – the man just didn't seem to want to be there – and a waterlogged script. Screens Aug. 3.

The Hurt Locker (2008)
The Oscar-winning picture that almost didn't even make a blip (it premiered on the film-festival circuit in 2008, but didn't get a theatrical release until late 2009, and even then took a while to build any awards momentum), Bigelow's drama is less about war and more about the psychology of being a warrior. It is as explosive as the bombs its hero (Jeremy Renner, up until then a hey-it's-that-guy TV actor) disposes of, but the real tension exists in the heads of its trauma-familiar soldiers. Almost a decade later, its power hasn't diminished in the slightest. Screens Aug. 12.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Further pressing into the murky morality of military action, Bigelow creates a search-and-destroy thriller that subverts any obvious catharsis that comes in a tale about just how America killed Osama bin Laden. An emotionally complex, narratively twisty and generally taut political thriller, Zero Dark Thirty stands as a testament to the grim geopolitics that envelope the world. Screens Aug. 15.

Kathryn Bigelow: On the Edge runs through Aug. 15 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto (tiff.net). Detroit opens Aug. 4.