Partners in crimes: Film's finest female dynamic duos

echoes Heavenly Creatures in several ways, most notably in its dark premise about two mentally unstable teenage girls who scheme to kill one of their parents. It also stars a pair of young and relatively unknown actresses, Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy, who would go on to become more familiar to audiences in subsequent years. But that’s where the similarities end. This clever psychological thriller strikes a far more cynical tone, often straying into screwball comedy. Cooke plays Amanda, an admitted sociopath facing animal cruelty charges for killing her horse with a knife. She has a fraught relationship with her classmate and one-time friend Lily, a tightly wound overachiever. After Amanda’s mother pays Lily to rekindle their estranged friendship, the two of them hatch a plan to kill Lily’s controlling stepfather and blame it on a local drug dealer (played by Anton Yelchin in his final screen appearance). It goes wrong in all sorts of entertaining ways that are made even better by Cooke and Taylor-Joy’s sharp performances.

This indie comedy slasher flew under the radar when it came out, but it hasn’t lost any of its bite since then. We’re still completely obsessed with true crime. If anything, it might be even more popular now. Tragedy Girls attempts to dissect and then skewer this obsession, through the lens of social media and influencer popularity. It stars Alexandra Shipp (Barbie) and Brianna Hildebrand (the Deadpool franchise) as high school students who run a popular true crime blog and YouTube channel under the name Tragedy Girls. They’ll do anything to boost their engagement numbers, including kidnapping a serial killer in order to learn his methods so they can stage their own attacks for the show. Eventually, and you can probably see this coming, they give up the whole idea of staging at all and just go for the real thing. Full of winking nods to genre tropes, it’s campy, gleeful, and genuinely fun.

Obviously, there are eight skilled criminals in , played by a stellar and talented cast, but like the film that kicked off the modern franchise, Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans 11, this one is all about the two criminal savants who run the show. Starring Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean (Danny’s sister) and Cate Blanchett as her former partner Lou Miller, Ocean’s 8 plays all the hits audiences have come to expect from these heist movies. Bullock and Blanchett are a formidable team, with charisma and chemistry that pours out of the screen. Debbie is the mastermind, having just been released from prison, where she spent five years working out the details of a bold robbery at the Met Ball. Meanwhile, Lou is the one who makes it all happen. By the end of the film, when the true scope of their operation becomes clear, we’re willing to follow them anywhere.

Continuing with the “anything you can do I can do better” theme of Ocean’s 8, is a remake of the 1988 comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which Michael Caine and Steve Martin compete to see which of them is the best swindler on the French Riviera. This time it’s Anne Hathaway (formerly one of Debbie Ocean’s 8) who’s the master confidence artist and Rebel Wilson who’s the small-time grifter encroaching on her territory. Just like the original, which itself was a remake of the 1964 comedy Bedtime Story, the two of them come to an agreement that the first one to scam a visiting tech billionaire (Alex Sharp) out of $500,000 will get the coastal town of Beaumont-sur-Mer all to herself. As you can imagine, wacky hijinks ensue.

There are serious, high-stakes capers, like stealing millions of dollars worth of diamonds from the Met Ball, and then there’s whatever you call the criminal conspiracy at the heart of . But the interesting thing about this story is that it happens to be true. Well, sort of. The story is loosely based on a criminal case in which the Phoenix Police Department confiscated $40 million worth of counterfeit coupons and assets purchased with the proceeds from selling them to unwitting consumers. Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste play fictional characters based on the women who find their purpose in life by defrauding big corporations in the name of the little guy. Queenpins mixes lighthearted comedy with a dash of social satire, but it’s Bell and Howell-Baptiste who really make it work.

Though much as the student body of Rockbridge Falls High School is willing to believe they’re juvenile delinquents, Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott) don’t set out to commit any crimes in . They just want the chance to get it on with some of their female classmates, through the ruse of a high school self-defense club for girls. How could that possibly go wrong? The film answers that question in spectacular fashion. Their actions spiral out of control and ultimately result in violence, bombings, and even deaths, but it’s all in the pursuit of a bit of harmless fun, and funniness.