Film Review: Radioactive

Pike’s energy brings (half-)life to Marie Curie biopic

Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) conducts experiments in her Paris lab.

Iranian director Marjane Satrapi, who was Oscar-nominated 13 years ago for turning her graphic novel Persepolis into a beautiful animated film, is back with another adaptation of a graphic novel. This time, however, Satrapi adapts Lauren Redniss’s 2010 National Book Award nominee Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout not as an animated picture, but as a live-action drama, and the results don’t work nearly as well as Satrapi’s first big success. Radioactive tells the story of famed Polish-French scientist Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) and her personal and professional triumphs and travails. Unfortunately, Satrapi’s new work yields a very mediocre film about a great woman who deserves a more dignified biopic than this facile, sentimental treatment.

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Film Review: The Goldfinch

Acting, cinematography are highlights of imperfect adaptation of Tartt’s famed novel 

Cinematographer Roger Deakins captures the desert at dusk as Las Vegas transplants Theo (Oakes Fegley, l.) and Boris (Finn Wolfhard) become friends.

As a film critic, I try to ignore early buzz on films I’m going to review so I can form my own unbiased opinion when I see the picture. But this month, it was hard to ignore the vitriol that poured on to social media after The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto Film Festival; hate for the movie was prolific and fierce. So, naturally, going into Monday’s reviewer screening, I was apprehensive: could the picture really be as bad as all that!? I’m here to tell you that, thankfully, it is not. Is it the year’s best film? Far from it, but it’s not nearly as awful as Twitter would have you believe. If you’re a cinema fan — and/or a fan of Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning novel on which the film is based — you will find enough here to keep you interested.

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Film Review: Dunkirk

Dunkirk: powerful and memorable

Soldiers await rescue.

In Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film Dunkirk, we follow a major battle early in World War II through the struggles of a number of soldiers, sailors, and airmen as they attempt a massive retreat from France across the English channel in the face of constant German attacks. Though the events of that tragic summer week in 1940 are well known, what’s not known, and what is the basis of the film’s significant triumph, are the fates of the individuals who are just trying to survive long enough to get home.
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