Tag: Sam Riley

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: Pride & Prejudice and Zombies

Zombie-slaying Bennet sisters worth cheering for. Zombies, not so much.

Victorian era badassery.
Victorian era badassery.

More influenced by 2005’s Pride & Prejudice starring Keira Knightley than the classic piece of literature by Jane Austen or the works of George A. Romero, Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, is a mediocre popcorn flick. It’s not as campy or cheeky as I’d had hoped, nor as serious and emotional as it could be if it avoided being the former. Despite the PG-13 rating, there’s enough genre blending jokes and tame action to make the first hour an enjoyable piece of escapism. Unfortuantely, an apparent inability to conclude the story whilst providing a non-anticlimactic finish makes the last 30 min a bore — an uninspired CGI-filled bore. Yet PPZ can be taken in its entirety as a relative success. The failings don’t take away from what most folks will expect from a sci-fi period piece romance (not sure the appropriate genre?) based on a popular piece of spoof fiction.

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Film Review: Maleficent

I don’t know you, I may have walked with you once upon a dream…

Well. Well. What magnificent horns you have.
Well. Well. What magnificent horns you have.

…but honestly, who are you?

This is not the Maleficent from Disney’s 1959 animated classic, Sleeping Beauty.  There’s a physical resemblance, sure.  For about 10-15 minutes, the story and tone seems to reflect the Disney version as well.  But mostly this is a completely new retelling, including new environments, and  newly structured characters and motives.  Unfortunately, it’s the title character that suffers the most from the creative liberties taken.  Yet, it’s still Angelina Jolie, playing the title character of Maleficent, who ends up stealing the show from start to finish with her powerful features, dark silhouette, and devotion to her character — no matter how weakened the character is now.

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