Based on a 1958 front-page saga, Terrence Malick's debut film is a brilliant update on the theme of outlaw lovers (in the tradition of You Only Live Once, Gun Crazy, and Bonnie and Clyde). Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek star as Kit and Holly, who shoot Holly's father during a heated argument and take off across the midwest on a murder spree in which nearly a dozen deaths are coolly inflicted. Compared to Malick's rebels, however, Ray's had causes galore. New York Times critic Vincent Canby notes, “Badlands inevitably invites comparison with...other important American films.... But it has a different vision of violence and death. Mr Malick spends no great amount of time invoking Freud to explain the behavior of Kit and Holly, nor is there any Depression to be held ultimately responsible. Society is, if anything, benign. This is the truth of Badlands, something that places it very much in the seventies in spite of its carefully recreated period detail.” British critic Robin Wood writes, “One of the most distinguished directorial debuts in the American cinema, Malick's film is especially notable for its highly sophisticated play with verbal and visual narrative, which here counterpoint instead of merely reinforce each other, producing a subtle, idiosyncratic balance between engagement and detachment, complicity and horror.”