Holly’s father […] is seen painting a billboard in the middle of an empty field. A panel is missing, through which you can see the blue sky beyond. It’s an optical illusion: a hole has fallen out of the world. It is in that hole, in a free-fall through the empty blue, that Kit and Holly dance.
— Sheila O’Malley (Criterion)
We meet [Kit] as he’s about to be fired from his job collecting trash, but he spends the rest of the movie on a virtual junk treasure hunt, inspecting, acquiring, and discarding various nonessential items displayed in the homes of other people. [And] it’s not insignificant that Holly’s disapproving father is a sign painter, a man who traffics in the bright promises of consumer culture—promises that may be empty but, in Kit’s mind, are never quite invalidated.
— Michael Almereyda (Criterion)
Holly’s voice-over in Badlands recalls film noirs, where characters narrate fateful events in retrospect. But more than an anguished confession, Holly’s narration presents a pastiche of phrases from “true confession” magazines of the 1950s. Through this mesh of clichés, we discover her inability to see her situation outside of the ready-made plots she has consumed.
— Tom Gunning (Criterion)
Synopsis: An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands.