Barbarella

Director: Roger Vadim

1968 / 98min / DCP

Among the earliest and most successful of De Laurentiis’s forays into live-action comic adaptations, a retrofuturist pop culture phenom based on the sexily scintillating French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella teamed Vadim and his then-wife Jane Fonda, who plays the role of the title character, a buxom space traveler using her wits and feminine charms in order to track down scientist Durand Durand, whose new “positronic ray” poses a threat to the whole of humanity. Cheeky, kitschy, and cheerfully salacious fun, with colorful and fanciful production design that imagines a positively swinging future.