Petula (Rachel Weisz) meets Dorothy (Susan Lynch) when Dorothy smacks a lead pipe into the head of Petula's boyfriend, who was strangling Petula at the time. Thus begins the darkly comic thriller Beautiful Creatures--a little bit Thelma & Louise, a little bit Alfred Hitchcock at his most sardonic. When Petula's boyfriend dies, she and Dorothy cook up a scheme to extort money out of the boyfriend's rich and vicious older brother--a scheme that would probably have fallen to pieces until an investigating police detective named George starts to help it along for devious reasons of his own. Soon Dorothy and Petula are coping with a bitten-off finger, Dorothy's own nasty boyfriend, a salesclerk with a bondage fetish, and more. Fans of movies with a similarly deadpan tone (like Bound, Fargo, and Pulp Fiction) will love the film's caustic humor, and both Weisz and Lynch are delightful. Fast-paced and unpredictable, Beautiful Creatures is a witty thriller that deserves attention. --Bret Fetzer
Susan Lynch, Rachel Weisz. A pair of abused women plot to stage a fake kidnapping so they can extort a ransom, but a leering detective complicates the scheme. 2000/color/89 min/R.
