Here we meet director Luc Besson, patron saint of beautiful, rebellious, and ultimately lethal young women. Anne Parillaud is the title character, a drug-addled teen who is spared a sentence of life imprisonment to become an expertly trained goverment assassin. Things get wacky when Nikita can't learn to juggle her newly fulfilled domestic life with the heavy emotional toll of surveiling, subduing, and terminating various enemies of the state. Look for Jean Reno in a fascinating precursor to his role as Leon, the cleaner, in Besson's later (and less interesting) film, The Professional.

Harold Check