Radioactive

Marie Sklodowska Curie is a scientist in Paris who cannot get laboratory space and whom nobody takes seriously. She starts working with Pierre Curie, finds polonium and radium, wins two Nobel prizes and is killed by what she discovered. The film is also about how institutions push a woman out: she is not invited to the Nobel ceremony, her taking her dead husband's chair is treated as a question, and the press tears her apart over a relationship. Marjane Satrapi directed. Rosamund Pike plays Curie. The source is Lauren Redniss's graphic novel of the same name. The most argued-over formal choice is the sudden jumps in time. In the middle of the discoveries the film stops and leaps to their much later consequences, cutting from a nineteenth-century laboratory to the cockpit of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. Chernobyl and radiotherapy arrive the same way. Opinion divided. Pike's performance is the part almost everyone praised; against that, the script was called dry, the discoveries rushed, and the film unable to get past the shape of the biopic. Who it is for: viewers interested in the history of science and in the mark one life leaves on a century. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a straight biography. The jumps keep breaking the flow and for some that is the weakest thing in it.