Tag: Rosamund Pike

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 Feature: Carrie and Chad Pick the Oscars

Film critics Carrie and Chad on who will – and who should – win the 87th Academy Awards

The 87th Academy Awards air this Sunday, February 22nd on ABC at 5:00pm PST (red carpet coverage begins at 4:00, if you want to dish on fashion highs and lows). There are some tight races this year – Best Picture and Best Actor are especially hard to call. Here are Carrie and Chad’s predictions – and hopes – for the major categories:
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Film Review: Gone Girl

Affleck, Pike anchor brilliant adaptation of best-selling novel

Ben Affleck channels mourning.
Ben Affleck’s Nick warily addresses a crowd gathered to help find his missing wife.

One of the most hotly anticipated movies of the fall season, Director David Fincher’s Gone Girl more than lives up to its expectations. Based on Gillian Flynn’s popular novel of the same name, and benefitting tremendously from a screenplay penned by the author herself, the film is sure to please both the book’s rabid fans as well as those fresh to the story. The picture has been heavily marketed as a crime mystery, and although it is that, it is also much, much more. In reality, Fincher and Flynn have given us a searing portrait of a marriage cleverly disguised as a taut thriller.

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Film Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness

Pegg’s performance is high point of mostly unoriginal travel tale

Hector (Simon Pegg) tries to find happiness in China... will he succeed!?
Hector (Simon Pegg) tries to find happiness in China… will he succeed!?

Hector and the Search for Happiness is a curious movie. Based on the trailer alone, you might think you’re in for a lighthearted, feel-good, seize-the-day picture, wherein the lead character Learns and Grows by ditching his staid life in search of adventure, à la Eat, Pray, Love or last year’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But the surprising thing about director Peter Chelsom’s film, based on a popular French novel by François Lelord, is that while it certainly contains its fair share of clichés and groan-inducing scenes, it is both darker and more sensitive than you might expect. Continue reading “Film Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness”