Nikita

Nikita (1990) opens with a young addict killing a policeman during a pharmacy robbery. She is sentenced to death, her death is then staged so that she is officially dead, and she is trained as an assassin by a government unit. The film's real subject is not the training but what comes after: she builds an ordinary life outside, and the two lives will not run at once. Luc Besson wrote and directed. Anne Parillaud leads, and Jean Reno appears briefly as a cleaner in one of the most remembered parts in the film, a figure Besson would expand later in Léon. Its influence outgrew its size. It was remade in America in 1993 as Point of No Return, adapted in Hong Kong as Black Cat, and turned into two separate television series. Much of the template for the female assassin over the following thirty years comes from here. The best sequence is the restaurant: at the end of her training, her first assignment arrives in the middle of a birthday dinner. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: French action cinema, character driven espionage, and post eighties visual style. Less good for: the state's total control over her is used as material rather than criticised. The romantic thread resolves too easily and the ending pushes hard for an emotional effect.