Bound (1996)

“Bound is one of those movies that works you up, wrings you out and leaves you gasping. It’s pure cinema, spread over several genres. It’s a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy…it’s skillful filmmaking, setting a puzzle that involves time, space, money and danger, and seeing how many different ways it can be solved.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

The Wachowskis (The Matrix) announce themselves with a debut that both honors and destabilizes the conventions of film noir, then in the midst of a ’90s neo-noir revival, rerouting its familiar architecture of betrayal and desire through a distinctly queer lens. When ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon) becomes entangled with Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the kept girlfriend of a volatile mobster, their scheme to steal from the syndicate unfolds as a tightly wound chamber piece of shifting power and calculated risk. Eschewing the fatalism that traditionally governs the genre, Bound instead locates its tension in questions of trust, control, and authorship: who holds the plan, who controls the narrative, and who ultimately gets to walk away. Sleek, seductive, and formally assured, Bound transforms noir’s language of entrapment into one of possibility, where desire becomes not a trap, but a means of escape.