The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“While tinged with the fatalism that attends any crime spree, [Thelma & Louise] has the thrilling, life-affirming energy for which the best road movies are remembered.”

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

It begins like a 1940s women’s picture, runs through a patch of noir territory, and increasingly picks up the attributes of an Americana crime movie, but Thelma & Louise is first and foremost a dialogue. When Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon’s characters plan a road trip, they aim to talk to one another, and in Callie Khouri’s Academy Award-winning screenplay, there’s ample time for all kinds of talk—of men, supposed happiness, and real violence. There’s also, most tellingly, the pop-philosophical question: ​“Are you up to this?” Thelma & Louise charts the limits of what can be said, dreamt, and felt in a studio-filmmaking model of society, and the distance by which its duo can outpace those limits. The film also measures the shifts between commercial Hollywood in the ​’90s, of which scene-setter Ridley Scott is an exemplar, and the New Hollywood of the ​’70s, from which the film gets its rebel spirit. This restoration premiered as part of Cannes Classics 2023.

“The movie becomes mythical—mutates into a sort of classic before one’s eyes … Both the heroines and the world they’re fleeing are so fully defined that Scott can depict [the film’s] showdowns on the same monumental scale he brought to the opening of Blade Runner without seeming unduly hyperbolic.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader