True Romance
Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper
Director: Tony Scott
It's a common conundrum with couples: you snuggle up on the sofa for a movie night, popcorn at the ready, but you can't decide what to watch. She wants a romantic tale filled with damsels in distress and dashing gents; he prefers something a little more escapist and action-packed: strong, silent types packing magnums and machetes.
There's little middle ground between the two - except perhaps for True Romance, a film that stands proud as one of the very few universally praised by both sexes.
Written by movie-obsessed motor mouth Quentin Tarantino the same year he hit paydirt with Reservoir Dogs, the film takes cues from and pays homage to classic cinema - all imbued with the Tarantino-isms that we've come to expect.
A comic bookstore guy and a hooker with a heart of gold meet and fall in love over a kung fu triple-bill and a plate of pie. After a deadly encounter with a white pimp, they escape with a suitcase of cocaine, kicking off a cross-country road trip to Hollywood, where their slow-witted actor friend, his pot-smoking roommate, a bunch of gangsters and two overeager detectives await.
Take the plot, sprinkle it with the stammering scriptwriter's trademark sense of dialogue, toss in a who's who of 1990s cinema in supporting roles and shoot the usually over-the-top director Tony Scott with a tranquiliser or two, and you have something approximating True Romance.