Femme Fatale / Live-Action Films

• 3 Days to Kill: Vivi is a very beautiful, sultry young woman with a constant air of menace who offers Ethan money he needs in return for him taking out several dangerous criminals. She's clearly pretty dangerous herself, urging Ethan to take ruthless action when he's hesitant.
• Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct is one of the most iconic examples in modern filmmaking. No surprise, seeing as how the entire film is a '90s update on the Film Noir genre. She seduces both men and women to attain her goals, tempts Nick with her emotional vulnerability after Roxy's death, and probably committed all the murders.
• Vivian, from noir classic The Big Sleep, is set up to be the typical Femme Fatale, such as being involved in several shady deals, gambling, and admitting to help cover up a murder all while trying to manipulate detective Marlowe into doing what she wants. Where the novel plays the trope completely straight, the film changes up the game by making her turn heroic halfway through the picture instead.
• Madelline Linscott from The Black Dahlia is the Dark Feminine to the sweet, angelic Kay's Light Feminine, hangs around seedy lesbian bars, and has affairs behind her rich parents' back. It's in constant doubt as to whether she can be trusted. Turns out she can't, and she's the one who murders Dwight while dressed as a man.
• In Brute Force (1947), Spencer tells the story of a woman he met in an illegal gambling place that stole his money and his car at gunpoint. He still can’t forget her.
• In The Cocoanuts, Penelope is accustomed to using her feminine charms to get unsuspecting men to do her bidding. Unfortunately, she's now up against the Marx Brothers...
• Selina Kyle has always been a classic example, but the way Anne Hathaway portrays her in The Dark Knight Rises takes it to a whole new level. Suffering from a major case of Heel–Face Revolving Door, her tough, street-smart cat burglar is as elegant as she is dangerous, something Bruce Wayne both notices and forgets when he's in her presence. Director Christopher Nolan claims that he has always envisioned Catwoman as an "old-school femme fatale".
• Deadly Pickup has Breezy Johnson, who seduces men and women alike, kills them while having sex with them, and steals their valuables.
• Summer in Definitely, Maybe is the sexually adventurous "bitch" that destroyed her boyfriend's career to advance her own. That said, her boyfriend was working for a Corrupt Politician.
• Detour: Vera sees through Roberts' ruse and blackmails him. She insists that they should milk the situation for all they can, instead of trying to distance themselves from it.
• Phyllis Dietrichson from the classic noir Double Indemnity. She starts an affair with Walter Neff, an insurance agent. Together, they convince her husband to take out a life insurance policy, then kill him and Make It Look Like an Accident so they could collect the money.
• The Dreamers evokes this trope with Isabelle - who is comfortable being naked around her brother and watching him masturbate. There's something very erotically dangerous about her - so it's no surprise that when the movie turns out to be happening during the 1968 Paris riots that Isabelle and her brother immediately get involved. Isabelle's actress Eva Green nearly got typecast as Femme Fatales after this.
• Barbara Matthews in Drive a Crooked Road. Her boyfriend Steve sends her to act as a Honey Trap to recruit Eddie into being the gang's Getaway Driver.
• Europa trilogy by Lars von Trier has two examples. Because these are Lars Von Trier movies, both characters are examples of ruthless deconstruction of the Femme Fatale trope, both utterly fail their agenda and turn out to be extreme versions of Jerkass Woobie trope.
  • In The Element of Crime, there is Kim, an Asian prostitute who slept with Serial Killer the protagonist is looking out for, and she tries to misguide the protagonist, but fails and, in the end, she can do nothing but cry when he watches how the man who was, in fact, her real lover and father of her child is hanged by himself.
  • The other example is Katharina Hartmann from Europa, who seduces the hero, makes him fall in love with her and marry her, exploiting her image of Innocent Bystander who merely got involved with Nazi underground, while in fact she was a Honey Trap for the hero, and she drove her father to suicide and tried to make the hero commit bombing killing many allied officers. She utterly fails at the end, and is killed along with every major character in the movie by suicidal bombing of the train by the protagonist.
• In Ex Machina, regardless of what Ava's motivations were, she does use her charm to manipulate Caleb. In fact, this is even invoked as a Turing Test by her creator.
  Nathan: Ava was a rat in a maze. And I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did. Now if that isn’t true AI, then what the fuck is?
• In the classic noir, Fallen Angel, Linda Darnell plays Stella who doesn't care about double-crossing romantic partners or stealing.
• Femme Fatale (2002) naturally has as its main character a female thief like this, played by Rebecca Romijn.
• A Foreign Affair has Marlene Dietrich as a woman with Nazi affiliations who has an American Captain lusting for her.
• The shade of Mal in Inception. She killed or tried to kill someone in about every other scene she was in, but she still gave the hero pause when he was faced with stopping her.
• Dr. Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. She seduces both Indiana and his father to gain vital information for the Nazi’s mission to find the Holy Grail. Like most femme fatales, she couldn’t overcome her biggest Fatal Flaw - greed. In a Literal Cliffhanger, she thought she could reach the grail with a free hand in time for Indiana to pull her up. Unfortunately, he can’t hold her slippery gloved hand and she falls to her death.
• Danique of The Last Witch Hunter has this trope down the pat — she's rich, beautiful in crime noir style, smokes from a cigarelle, talks in an elegant and sensual manner, and of course tries to have Kaulder killed.
• Brigid O'Shaughnessy from The Maltese Falcon is one of the earliest examples in noir fiction. She's directly involved in betrayal, theft, and several murders all while trying to play innocent to (not to mention seduce) the lead character throughout most of the film and the book.
• Mulholland Falls: Interestingly, subverted with Jennifer Connelly's character Alison despite the setting being ripe for it. While she *did* have a torrid affair with the main character, a married Sergeant in the LAPD, it's never established that she was evil or manipulative in any way. She's even killed early on and becomes his motive for revenge against the real villains.
• In Murder by Proxy, the glamorous heiress Phyllis Brunner approaches the down-and-out Casey Morrow in the bar of his hotel and inveigles herself into conversation with him before offing him £500 for a simple job: marrying her.
• Naked Weapon is all about a Murder, Inc. organization that kidnaps and trains young Asian girls to seduce and kill their male targets. Their favorite method of killing the target is to rip out the spinal cord, which they can do in the blink of an eye. Often, they will first have sex with the mark and then offer a massage. Cue the spine attack.
• The eponymous Nikita is alongside aforementioned Catherine when it comes to modern iconic examples of this and Nikita managed to inspire other examples listed here such as Ada Wong from Resident Evil. A professional assassin who uses her sex appeal to murder for the French government, Nikita is actually a subversion and deeply sympathetic example being a Broken Bird who’s drug addiction was used against her by her government handlers and is torn between her work and genuine Love Interest Marco who wants to try and help Nikita escape from the system.
• Kathie Moffat (no relation) from Out of the Past is the quintessential film noir example. She lies, steals, kills at least three people, and conspires to commit another murder, uses sex to ensnare men to do what she wants, and looks great in a cocktail dress.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: Angelica is very flirtatious towards Jack and tends to manipulate him to do her father's bidding. The mermaids use their charms to lure sailors to their deaths.
• Myra is Please Murder Me!. She married Joe for his money, then manipulates Joe's best friend Craig into falling in love with her, before murdering Joe and claiming it was self-defence, and relying on Craig's legal expertise to get her of the murder charge.
• Vera in Quicksand is a low-rent version of this. It is implied that a lot has happened in her life before she started working as a cashier in Dan's favourite diner. She latches on to Dan as shortcut to getting her longed-for mink coat. She doesn't tell him to steal for her—he does that off his own bat—but once she finds out, she is happy to encourage him. And, when things go south, she rats him out to the cops in an attempt to save her own skin.
• Marian Stevens in Robin and the 7 Hoods who, in turn, seduces or attempts to seduce Robbo, Little John, Guy Gisborne, Deputy Potts and finally Allan A. Dale in order to control the Chicago mobs from behind the scenes.
• RocknRolla has Stella, who deconstructs the archetype: She has the looks (which allows her to play all sides in order to obtain a whole lot of money stolen from The Mafiya (twice!)), but unfortunately she doesn't really have the smarts to go with it (she became a way too obvious suspect for the person who did the Inside Job and the only reason she's not found early on is that her boss (the leader of said Mafiya) likes her too much to really listen to his Dragon)... and what does her in is that she accepts a painting that she should have known her boss liked a lot (had she actually bothered to listen to him in details other than what she cared about), and in fact was berserk about it having been stolen, and placed it in her home in a place where he would see it the moment he walked in. Whatever he did to her in retaliation, we were probably better off not seeing.
• Katherine "Kitty" March from Scarlet Street, and how. A model turned amateur scam artist, she wraps the main character around her finger with lies, faux sweetness, and alleged helplessness. Meanwhile, she and her real boyfriend completely ruin the lead's life in the process.
• Solo has Qi'ra, Han Solo's First Love, who is even described as such in pre-release material. She's an attractive and flirtatious young woman who serves as Dryden Vos' top lieutenant and is a capable Dark Action Girl, though she prefers to use honeyed words or trickery to get what she wants. It's not entirely clear whose side she's on or what her motives are, and Tobias Beckett straight-up warns Han he can't trust her (Han being Han, he doesn't pay much attention). As it turns out, Beckett's concerns are partially right, as while she does save Han’s life over Dryden's, Qi'ra pursues her own self-interests above all else and leaves Han behind to take Vos' position. Lawrence Kasdan actually stated he drew inspiration for Qi'ra from Kathie Moffat.
• The German movie Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer has a rare example where the Femme Fatale is transgender. She is a nightclub singer who seduces a closeted public prosecutor so that he can then be blackmailed by political opponents. Previously the singer's boyfriend had been arrested by the authorities for public indecency (homosexuality being illegal at that point in time in the 1950s) and she was offered a reduction to his sentence in return.
• Another great noir performance by Barbara Stanwyck as Martha Ivers in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. She kills her aunt as a young child and stops at nothing to make sure no one finds out.
• Tae-ju in Thirst (2009), who seduces Sang-hyun, convinces him to murder her husband and turn her into a vampire, then turns into a gleeful killer.
• Too Late for Tears: Jane (played by Lizabeth Scott) is the cruelest, most without principle femme fatale ever put to screen.
• Troll 2: Creedence in her younger human form seduces Brent in this manner.
• In Up the Front, Mata Hari seduces British men in order to get information for the German army.
• The White Orchid: The White Orchid is a very beautiful woman who had used her good looks to seduce both men and women, using this to rob or murder them.
• Jessica from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. She's a toon clearly created by some artist to be the perfect example, from her dangerous good looks and sultry voice to the slinky way she moves. Even her smile is suspicious. She's actually a subversion of the trope: she's a Red Herring and was telling the truth all along. Jessica loves her husband Roger dearly, and does everything she can to protect him, even if it ends up backfiring on her in the long run. When she says, "I'm not bad... I'm just drawn that way," she's absolutely right.
• Viper from The Wolverine, kills with a kiss… literally. She does know how to use her considerable sexuality as a weapon.

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