We present experimental results on the angular dependence of the magnetoresistance and critical currents of ${\mathrm{Bi}}_{2}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{y}$ thin films irradiated by 1 GeV Pb ions along the c axis with a matching field of ${B}_{\ensuremath{\varphi}}=2\mathrm{T}.$ When the magnetic field is applied parallel to the defects, we observe, for $0.1\mathrm{T}l{\ensuremath{\mu}}_{0}Hl1.4\mathrm{T}$ and $1.5\mathrm{K}l~Tl{T}_{c},$ a minimum of magnetoresistance or a peak of critical current that can be explained in terms of localization of vortices into defects as predicted in the Bose-glass theory. Two regimes of pinning are found: for ${\ensuremath{\mu}}_{0}Hl1\mathrm{T}$ vortices are pinned individually into the defects. However, the field dependence of the macroscopic pinning force indicates that due to the random distribution of defects, not all the vortices are pinned even in this low field regime. Above ${\ensuremath{\mu}}_{0}H\ensuremath{\sim}1.2\mathrm{T},$ vortex interactions become important and the directional effect disappears sharply at ${\ensuremath{\mu}}_{0}H\ensuremath{\sim}1.4\mathrm{T},$ i.e., well below the matching field. Pinning is found to be optimal for a field of the order of ${B}_{\ensuremath{\varphi}}/2.$ The comparison with earlier results on ${\mathrm{Bi}}_{2}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}{\mathrm{CaCu}}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{8}$ thin films and ${\mathrm{Bi}}_{2}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}{\mathrm{CaCu}}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{8}{/\mathrm{B}\mathrm{i}}_{2}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{y}$ multilayers allows us to argue that for thin films, anisotropy is the parameter which controls the occurrence of the above directional effect. Thus, columnar defects can be seen as a sensitive probe of vortex dimensionality.