Female Film Critics 24/375
Radium Girls, the story of young women who painted watch faces with glowing radium-infused paint, fits with Marjane Satrapi’s Radioactive, a sterling effort about Marie Curie. These stories must be told even today because a Geiger counter, waved over the grave of a radium girl, clicks for 1,000 years.
Read more
Based on true events during the late 1920s, this docudrama focuses on two teenage Cavallo sisters employed at the American Radium Factory in Orange, New Jersey, painting numbers on the popular, glow-in-the-dark watch faces, earning one-penny each. The superb production design reflects prodigious research, reflecting the period through archival newsreel footage and period costumes.
Read more
Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler’s fact-based drama Radium Girls may be set a century in the past, but certain aspects of the story feel as timely as today’s headlines — for instance, when Joey King’s character Bessie bemoans: “Why is there so much wrong in the world that no one knows about?” That feeling of helplessness in the face of events that feel completely out of your control is bound to strike a chord with today’s audiences.
Read more
Radium Girls is a revelation; a rich dramatization of the historical events that took place in Orange, NJ in 1927-28. Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, who co-wrote the original screenplay with Brittany Shaw, Radium Girls blends period social drama, courtroom intrigue, labor history and a women’s empowerment message.
Read more
“If you place a Geiger Counter over the grave of a Radium girl, it will click for a thousand years.” This written quote is part of the film Radium Girls, the shocking, fascinating, and well-executed new feature, co-directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, based on a true story no doubt very few people had heard of, just as I hadn’t.
Read more