An unattributed missile is launched at the US, setting off a desperate effort inside the White House to determine who fired it and how to respond: not the latest news headline but the premise of Kathryn Bigelow’s political thriller A House of Dynamite, which will premiere at the Venice film festival .

The film marks a return to the large-scale, geopolitically attuned storytelling that made Bigelow one of the most decorated directors of her generation.

Few film-makers have been so consistently engaged with the faultlines of American power as Bigelow. In 2008’s The Hurt Locker she charted the psychological intensity of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. Four years later, in Zero Dark Thirty , she dramatised the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. Her latest film turns to a different, th

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