With her gripping film The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her latest movie, which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. She is one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless (1982) reflected those academic origins, but subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark (1987), the female vigilante movie Blue Steel (1989), and the surfer crime thriller Point Break (1991) demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking. The first volume of Bigelow's interviews ever published, Peter Keough's collection covers her early success with Near Dark, the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days (1995) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), and her triumph with The Hurt Locker. In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to renowned directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill. Peter Keough, Boston, Massaschusetts, is film editor at the Boston Phoenix. He is the editor of Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship and has published in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Sight & Sound.

In For Kids of All Ages, members of the National Society of Film Critics celebrate the wonder of childhood in cinema. In this volume, original essays commissioned especially for this collection stand alongside classic reviews from prominent film critics like Jay Carr and Roger Ebert. Each of the seven sections in this collection takes on a particular aspect of children’s cinema, from animated features to adaptations of beloved novels. The films discussed here range from the early 1890s to the present. The contributors draw on personal connections that make their insights more trenchant and compelling. The essays and reviews in For Kids of All Ages are not just a list of recommendations—though plenty are included—but an illuminating, often personal study of children’s movies, children in movies, and the childish wonder that is the essence of film.

With her gripping film The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (b. 1951) made history in 2010 by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. Since then she has also filmed history with her latest movie, Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. She is one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but her roots go back four decades to the very non-Hollywood, avant-garde art world of New York City in the 1970s. Her first feature The Loveless reflected those academic origins, but such subsequent films such as the vampire-Western Near Dark, the female vigilante movie Blue Steel, and the surfer-crime thriller Point Break demonstrated her determination to apply her aesthetic sensibilities to popular, genre filmmaking. The first volume of Bigelow's interviews ever published, Peter Keough's collection covers her early success with Near Dark; the frustrations and disappointments she endured with films such as Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker; and her triumph with The Hurt Locker. In conversations ranging from the casual to the analytical, Bigelow explains how her evolving ambitions and aesthetics sprang from her earliest aspirations to be a painter and conceptual artist in New York in the 1970s and then expanded to embrace Hollywood filmmaking when she was exposed to such renowned directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and George Roy Hill.