Badlands announced the arrival of a major talent: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven). His impressionistic and sometimes blackly comic take on the notorious Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate killing spree of the late 1950s uses a serial-killer narrative as a springboard for an oblique teenage romance, lovingly and idiosyncratically enacted by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The film also introduced many of the elements that would earn writer/director Malick his passionate following: the enigmatic approach to narrative and character, the unusual use of voice-over, the juxtaposition of human violence with natural beauty, the poetic investigation of American dreams and nightmares. Warren Oates co-stars.