Spice up your Valentine’s Day with a dash of danger. With its exhilarating blend of crime, romance, and fatalistic desire, the couple-on-the-lam premise has proven an irresistible lure to generations of filmmakers across genres and movements, from film noir (THEY LIVE BY NIGHT) to New Hollywood (BADLANDS) to the French New Wave (PIERROT LE FOU) to Blaxploitation (THOMASINE & BUSHROD) and beyond. Sexy, thrilling, and transgressive, these tales of amorous outlaws continue to seduce because they offer the ultimate romantic fantasy: a vision of lovers united against the world, living—and dying—according to their own rules.
Directed by Fritz Lang • 1937 • United States
Starring Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane
Fritz Lang brings his bitterly ironic fatalism to this prototypical couple-on-the-run crime drama and key forerunner of film noir. Ex-con Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is a career criminal struggling t...
Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1948 • United States
Starring Cathy O’Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva
Legendary director Nicholas Ray began his career with this lyrical film noir, the first in a series of existential genre films overflowing with sympathy for America’s outcasts and underdogs...
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis • 1950 • United States
Starring Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger
Bart Tare (John Dall) has been enamored with firearms since he was a kid. Annie Laurie Star (Peggy Cummins) is the sharp-shooting queen of a traveling carnival. When Bart beats Laurie in a sexuall...
Directed by John Farrow • 1950 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue, Claude Rains
Young doctor Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) is drawn into a web of deceit when he falls for his passionate but troubled patient Margo (Faith Domergue), not knowing she is married. A violent encoun...
Directed by Felix E. Feist • 1951 • United States
Starring Ruth Roman, Steve Cochran, Lurene Tuttle
Having spent his entire adult life behind bars, brooding ex-con Bill Clark (Steve Cochran) is like a newborn in a fast, unforgiving world when he is finally released from prison. Heading to New Yo...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet ...
Directed by Leonard Kastle • 1969 • United States
Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) is sullen, overweight, and lonely. Desperate for affection, she joins Aunt Carrie's Friendship Club and strikes up a correspondence with Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), a charismatic smooth talker who could be the man...
Directed by Terrence Malick • 1973 • United States
Starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates
BADLANDS announced the arrival of a major talent: Terrence Malick. His impressionistic take on the notorious Charles Starkweather killing spree of the late 1950s uses a serial-killer narrative as...
Directed by Gordon Parks Jr. • 1974 • United States
Starring Max Julien, Vonetta McGee, George Murdock
Blaxploitation’s answer to BONNIE AND CLYDE follows the exploits of early-twentieth-century bounty hunter Thomasine (Vonetta McGee) and the bandit Bushrod (Max Julien), who, after they rekindle...
Directed by Carl Franklin • 1992 • United States
Starring Bill Paxton, Cynda Williams, Billy Bob Thornton
Carl Franklin’s neonoir is thick with hard-boiled atmosphere and tightly wound tension. After two ruthless drug dealers, Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) and Pluto (Michael Beach), commit a string o...
Directed by Gregg Araki • 1992 • United States
Starring Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore
A gay THELMA & LOUISE for the New Queer Cinema movement, Gregg Araki’s couple-on-the-run romance follows two HIV-positive lovers—hustler Luke (Mike Dytri) and film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore)—who, with nothing left ...
Directed by Arturo Ripstein • 1996 • France, Mexico, Spain
In this alternately macabre and mirthful thriller, based on a true-crime story, renowned Mexican director Arturo Ripstein brings a stylish audacity to the tale of the "Lonely Hearts Killers," a couple who, in the 1940s, posed as brother ...
Directed by Amy Seimetz • 2012 • United States
Starring Kate Lyn Sheil, Kentucker Audley, A. J. Bowen
Written and directed by Amy Seimetz, this tantalizingly enigmatic, sun-kissed noir follows Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) on a tense and mysterious road trip t...
Directed by David Lowery • 2013 • United States
Starring Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster
Brought to life with exquisite detail and rich cinematography by Bradford Young, the gritty landscape of 1970s Texas Hill Country is the backdrop for this mood-drenched collision of love and crime. Af...
