La Femme Nikita

Friday, April 29 - Saturday, April 30, 2011

“Starting with a bloody tour de force – a drugstore robbery – this seldom lets up. The eponymous heroine, a punk-junkie sociopath, is given a life sentence for killing a cop, but after being drugged by her captors, wakes up believing herself dead. And so she is, officially: held in a secret government establishment which trains undercover assassins, she is given a new identity; and on her eventual release, she turns her violent tendencies to patriotic use, sporadically abandoning both her new-found respectability and her law-abiding lover to earn her keep with a gun… [a] relentlessly stylish noir-thriller… benefits enormously from a memorably assured, intense performance from Anne Parillaud. Her scenes with her prison boss/Svengali (Karyo) and her gullible lover (Anglade) are surprisingly touching, so that there is for once an emotional undertow to Besson’s visual pyrotechnics.” – Time Out (London)

• Country France
• Language In French
• Rating R
• Year 1991
• Running Time 118 minutes
• Director Luc Besson

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