Strange Days (1995)

Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days arrives at the end of 1995 with a great deal on its mind and a budget it could not recoup. Los Angeles, 1999, days from the millennium, is a war zone of curbside commerce and police helicopters. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) peddles SQUID discs, recorded memories that let paying customers wear another person's skin for a few minutes. The premise is a noir engine, greased with voyeurism and dread, and the film never lets us forget that the product being sold is other people's suffering. That is a bleak piece of social observation, and it lands.

The film's political spine is racial, and it is unmissable. The murdered rapper Jeriko One was killed by two officers for lyrics that stirred protests, a plot line lifted from the Rodney King beating and the 1992 uprising that followed. Bigelow has said she worked the downtown cleanup and felt the anger and the disparity firsthand. Her film converts that into a conspiracy reaching the deputy police commissioner's office, and it ends with a crowd on the verge of riot and two officers arrested, one dead by his own hand. The class critique runs alongside: a music mogul keeps his own artists under surveillance, and the climax unfolds at a party for the city's wealthy elite. The anger is atmospheric, not argued.

Angela Bassett's Mace does the heavy lifting, a bodyguard who pulls Lenny from burning cars and later puts down two armed officers with a baton and a taser. She is the film's moral center and its muscle, and casting a Black woman in that role for a 1995 studio science fiction picture was a deliberate choice. Elsewhere the ledger is thin. There is no queer content of any kind, no environmental anxiety, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character. The political material arrives through plot instead of sermon, which keeps the preaching modest. A serious film, then, and a commercially doomed one, which is its own kind of review.