Curator Watchlist
A stylish, influential French assassin thriller with a strong central performance and a cool, pulpy momentum. It’s not as emotionally rich as its reputation sometimes suggests, but the film’s neon-soaked atmosphere, moral ambiguity, and proto-modern female-assassin template still make it worth seeing.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 57m
Director: Luc Besson
Starring: Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tchéky Karyo
A beautiful felon, sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a policeman, is given a second chance – as a secret political assassin controlled by the government.
Luc Besson
Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tchéky Karyo
A stylish, influential French assassin thriller with a strong central performance and a cool, pulpy momentum. It’s not as emotionally rich as its reputation sometimes suggests, but the film’s neon-soaked atmosphere, moral ambiguity, and proto-modern female-assassin template still make it worth seeing.
Nikita is one of those films that helped define an entire lane of action cinema: glossy, romantic, violent, and slightly unhinged. Luc Besson stages the transformation of a delinquent into a government assassin with real visual flair, and Anne Parillaud gives the role enough volatility and fragility to keep the movie moving even when the script is more interested in attitude than interiority.
What lingers most is the film’s mood: rain-slicked streets, cold institutional spaces, and a sense that every relationship is transactional, even the tender ones. The action is effective rather than spectacular, but the movie’s influence is bigger than its set pieces. You can feel how much later assassin films borrowed from its cool surface and its idea of a woman weaponized by systems around her.
It’s also a film that invites criticism. The character is often defined through men, and the movie’s idea of liberation is compromised by the same power structures it dramatizes. Still, as a piece of stylish genre filmmaking with a memorable central performance, it remains compelling and historically important.
Dolev Amitai (2.5★) · 276 likes
La Femma Nikita is the film Lub Besson made before Leon.So obviously some hype is there. But unfortunately, it does not reach the same heights as Leon. Nikita suffers from something I don't see much in films. Its best part is in the middle. It is bookended by two rather dissapointing parts, at least for me. The first part of the film is a little confused, and honestly a little annoying.I get that Nikita is a drug addict,… more
robin moon (2★) · 262 likes
This is a pretty big case of "dude writing a 'female power fantasy' that's actually a male sex fantasy." If you needed more confirmation of this, the final scene of the film isn't Nikita going off and living a happy life, it's the two most significant men in her life having a lovely chat about how they'll both miss her after one of them has torn up a note she left for the other out of jealousy.
shookone (3.5★) · 189 likes
the whole perverse mental apparatus of Besson is visible here; La femme(!) Nikita is very much the epitome of what his mind would produce in the following decades. Besson’s fetish object as usual: a naive (not so innocent) but wild animal. a young woman as an enigmatic beast, of violence as much as of sexuality. "girls just wanna have fun" is a sentence that Besson is aware of, being very scared of it. first she’s becoming the victim of drug
Killian Morlaes (4★) · 181 likes
French culture is wine, baguette, cheese and Nikita killing people.
Angelica Jade Bastién🪼🌷 (2★) · 154 likes
Nikita is such a non-character. I have no idea about who she is, what she desires, and what propels her. She’s a mess of impulses with no inner guide or reason behind them. Never need to see this again.
Another Besson crime thriller with the same cool, melancholy energy and a hitman-centered emotional core.
A sharp, funny, action-forward story about a woman rediscovering her lethal identity.
Stylish, bruising, and built around a formidable female operative moving through a corrupt spy world.
A direct American remake-adjacent companion piece that explores the same assassin-transformation fantasy.
A hyper-stylized revenge film centered on a woman turned into a weapon and trying to reclaim herself.
For viewers drawn to cool, melancholy hitman cinema with a strong sense of fatalism.
A glossy assassin-training thriller that leans into the same blend of glamour, violence, and exploitation.
If the appeal is kinetic violence wrapped in sleek genre style, this is a high-water mark.
A more political, more tragic French thriller about a man used by the state and discarded by it.
A meditative outsider-assassin film that pairs cool surfaces with existential drift.
For the propulsive European style, urgency, and a protagonist driven by momentum more than exposition.
A stripped-down identity-and-training thriller about a person rebuilt by covert systems.
government control, assassin training, identity and reinvention, female antihero, romance under surveillance, institutional violence, redemption, moral ambiguity
thriller, action, neo-noir, female assassin, French cinema, stylized violence, 1980s, identity crisis, crime drama, cult classic