Nikita

La Femme Nikita, released as Nikita in France, is a 1990 French-language action thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson. The film stars Anne Parillaud as the title character, a criminal who is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a policeman during the armed robbery of a pharmacy. Her government handlers fake her death and recruit her as a professional assassin. After intense training, she starts a career as a killer, in which she struggles to balance her work with her personal life.

Besson has said that he wrote Nikita with Parillaud, then his romantic partner, in mind. The film was considered a surprise hit. Roger Ebert called it a "smart, hard-edged, psycho-romantic thriller" in his review. Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: "La Femme Nikita combines hip violence, punk anomie, lavish settings and an old-fashioned paean to the power of love."