Thelma & Louise (Special Edition)

These days, girls kick ass all the time. Buffy, Michelle Yeoh, the Power Puffs—it’s not even remarkable anymore. Which makes it hard to believe that’s it’s been a mere 12 years since Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s feminist buddy movie. But in those ancient days of 1991, the damsel in distress wasn’t expected to stand up and fight back. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon give terrific performances as the two friends who unintentionally kill a would-be rapist and flee the law across the Southwest. But it’s really screenwriter Callie Khouri that makes the engine go here. Her classy, feminist revamp of the outlaw road movie is too deft and nuanced for the inevitable charges of man-bashing to stick. It helps a great deal that it’s also funny, and infused with a sense of liberation, in all senses of that word.