... she breaks important action movie conventions, according to Jessica Winter on slate.com. 
Bigelow's newest movie is The Hurt Locker and she has directed arguably the greatest action movie of all time in Point Break:
"Pick any scene at random from among Bigelow's films and it's possible to mistake it for a high-grade Jerry Bruckheimer or Joel Silver production: the roiling guitars, the guns 'n' ammo, the flaming cars, the shirtless guys punching one another. But one of Bigelow's many virtues as an auteur—and perhaps her box-office Achilles' heel—is her willingness to break some unwritten rules of the hard-charging spectacles that are often her stock in trade..."
And regarding the discomfort of some of the violence in her films:
"Take, for example, the infamous snuff-film scene in Strange Days: The villain traps his victim, hooks her up to the virtual-reality device that will download his sensory experience into her brain, and then rapes and strangles her—meaning that she experiences both her own rape and murder and her killer's pleasure in same, and we get to watch. Whether you read this scene as a provocative film-theory vignette on the internalized male gaze or just a vile precursor to Saw, Hostel, and the rest of the torture-porn genre to come—or both—you will long to scrub your brain with a Brillo Pad after viewing."
I have a feeling she watches gay porn too. Just kidding. She's awesome!