Yearning to escape the tedium of their everyday lives, best friends Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), a bored housewife and a straight-laced waitress at a coffee shop, hit the road in Louise’s ’66 Thunderbird convertible for a three-day fishing trip with no husbands, boyfriends, or other such barriers to the giddy promise of freedom. Things don’t go quite according to plan when an encounter with a drunken, foul-mouthed, would-be rapist transforms their vacation into a cross-country getaway, as the two desperate fugitives race towards the Mexican border with the police, led by sympathetic investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel), in hot pursuit. Ridley Scott’s film, presented here in a 4K restoration, was a commercial and cultural sensation on release in 1991, rewriting the rules of the road movie in exhilarating and cathartic fashion.

Notes by David O’Mahony.