Female Film Critics 24/375
Emerald Fennell’s baroque psychosexual thriller wants you to have fun. There are lines that are spun with a golden malice. She has no pity for the upper crust and delights in displaying how insular they are and how easily they wield their wealth and titles. Their peccadillos are supposed to be transgressive, but in effect they are just the result of bored rich people needing their fix from extending a form of noblesse oblige.
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Saltburn satirizes the ultrarich in 2006 England. How can a scholarship student at posh Oxford University, England, possibly fit in or relate to his privileged, silver-spoon-in-their-mouths classmates? In writer/director Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, set in 2006, that’s the dilemma for poor Oliver Quick who looks as drab as others find him. But he has one advantageous attribute, i.e., he watches carefully and assesses individuals astutely.
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From the moment the crimson red, Hammer horror-inspired opening titles show onscreen, the film warns it will not be your usual British uni coming of age story. It wouldn’t be, would it, given that it comes from Emerald Fennell, who brought us Promising Young Woman? That movie, Fennell’s feature debut as writer/director, won her a Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and speaking of promise, made audiences and critics frothy to see what she’d do with her sophomore feature. Though not nearly as original as her first, Saltburn, a sexually transgressive tale of privilege and the desire to belong, allows its lead performer to shine brighter than a diamond encrusted dagger.
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Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell will help kick off the cinematic holiday season when her Saltburn bows into theaters in limited release on Nov. 24, which is Black Friday. It will expand to additional theaters Dec. 1. Hailing from MRC Film and Amazon Studios, “Saltburn” also will reunite Fennell with two-time Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan, who starred in Fennell’s 2020 feature film directorial debut Promising Young Woman.
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Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is a wickedly subversive, exquisitely twisty character study that leaves no room for redemption and satisfying resolutions, and that’s the real genius of it. Fennell defies our expectations and delivers a clever character study disguised as an “eat the rich” satire, where everyone is a horrible person and absolutely deserves what they get.
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It isn’t often that a fictional film boldly explores the ugly side of those who con the elderly. Already, then, I Care a Lot wades into unusual territory. But that barely suggests the unexpected, wildly daring narrative that writer/director J Blakeson presents without sentimental indulgence. In fact, unmitigated depravity comes without a hint of empathy.
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I Care a Lot is a wild ride of a movie – which is definitely not what you would expect from a story about legal conservatorship. Rosamund Pike is riveting as Marla Grayson, a legal guardian who preys on the elderly. I Care a Lot joins Promising Young Woman in a new genre of films that present important topics in a fresh, original way and make people pay attention. Rather than preach or lecture, they get their point across by brilliantly using dark humor and eye-popping style.
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In a time when we seem forced to plead with society daily to believe both women and science, the story of Marie Curie feels especially relevant, despite taking place more than a century ago. Marjane Satrapi’s Radioactive brings this fierce, opinionated, passionate woman (played powerfully by Rosamund Pike) to vivid life, chronicling how she changed the course of history with her discovery of radium.
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Feminist, feverish and flushed with the need to achieve her destiny while overcoming the scientific patriarchy that stood in her way, Rosamund Pike’s take on Marie Curie, the Polish-born mother of radium and polonium, gives the biopic Radioactive an indelible pulse and a tartly brusque sense of purpose. That said, I haven’t felt so nervous for a character’s well-being since Nicole Kidman’s cabaret performer Satine began coughing in between pop tunes in Moulin Rouge!
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The film adheres to enjoyably conventional depictions of Marie Curie’s rise as a gifted, obsessed scientist who suffers no fools and wins the Nobel Prize twice, but it shifts in time and tone to also examine the future outcomes that Curie’s groundbreaking discoveries of the elements radium and polonium wrought on the world, namely, the creation of the atomic bomb.
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