Partners in crimes: Film’s finest female dynamic duos
With Drive-Away Dolls and Love Lies Bleeding bringing bad girls back to cinemas, we're rounding up our favorite pairings from the past
Film Features Thelma & Louise
Clockwise from top left: Thelma And Louise (MGM), Chicago (Miramax), The Handmaiden (CJ Entertainment), and Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros.) Graphic: The A.V. Club
The trailers for the upcoming films Drive-Away Dolls (opening February 23) and Love Lies Bleeding (opening March 8) have us thinking about all the badass women who have teamed up in films through the years, especially the ones with criminal intent. They may love each other or hate each other, but they belong to a sisterhood of women who aren’t content to simply play the hand society has dealt them. They’re fighting back against a rigged game. For these characters, rules and morals are merely suggestions. That’s what makes them so much fun to watch. Here are our favorite female lawbreakers and troublemakers from films of the past, listed in chronological order of release.
13 Comments
I think Bullock could have a few entries here – with Melissa McCarthy in The Heat, and Regina King in Miss Congeniality 2, for example.
— but … they were victims, not criminals!
Shawn and Marlon Wayans in White Chicks.
No Heartbreakers with Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt?
No love for Sidney and Gail. Yeah they didn’t always get along but they got the job done! 😉
Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey are amazing in Heavenly Creatures. Amazing it was the film debut for both. Though Lynskey has said that it wasn’t that difficult to play her character, who is smitten with & in awe of Kate Winslet, since she had never met an actual glamorous movie star before & that was how she actually felt about her, and still does.
I hated Queenpins. The real life people were just garbage and the way their characters were positioned as cute chirpy suburban gals who just (hee hee!) sold semiautomatic rifles to biker gangs totally rubbed me the wrong way. And the implication at the end that they just got away with it all and went to do it again in Europe… I was supposed to root for that?
Why weren’t there weren’t any movies from before the 90s?
That’s has been a common issue around here for awhile. They’ve been ramping up the number of listicles they publish, but apparently nobody who works at the AV Club now knows much about pop culture before roughly 1989 so it’s just a sandwich of low-quality crap.
Maybe Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney from Night of the Comet
That is not clockwise from top left.
Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla from Mulholland Drive count in my book.