Harvey Keitel wears an unidentified watch

In a parked car at night, Victor the Cleaner watches the street through heavy black-framed glasses while the lights behind him blur into green and blue. Harvey Keitel plays Victor, and where his wrist rests near the door a watch throws back a single hard point of light. The frame is graded so dark that nothing else about the watch resolves.

Point of No Return (1993), directed by John Badham, is Warner Bros.' English-language remake of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita from 1990. Bridget Fonda plays a condemned criminal whose execution the government fakes so it can train her as an assassin. Keitel plays Victor, the cleaner the program sends in when a killing goes wrong and the evidence has to vanish.

Besson's original carried the same role down to the name: Jean Reno played Victor le nettoyeur, Victor the Cleaner, and the remake kept him intact. A cleaner's value is that nothing he handles can be traced afterward, and the photography extends the same favor to his watch, handing back a glint and nothing a viewer could look up.

The role suited Keitel. The next year he played Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction, another cleaner summoned to a private house to make a car and a corpse disappear before the morning was out.