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 policemen during an armed pharmacy robbery. Her government handlers fake her death and recruit her as a professional assassin. After intense training, she starts a career as a killer, where 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." It was remade as Black Cat (1991) in Hong Kong, Point of No Return (1993) in Hollywood, and in Bollywood as Kartoos (1999). Two English-language television series were produced based on the film, La Femme Nikita (1997–2001) and Nikita (2010–2013).