Episode 37: Radioactive, Starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie!

How do two astonishing gifted women—director Marjane Sartrapi and actor Rosamund Pike—make a movie together about 2x Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and have it come out this boring? Start by combining masterful visual style with dull, on-the-nose words, and then add weird, apocryphal character quirks (Marie Curie is afraid of hospitals for … reasons) and stick the most interesting elements of the story in the epilogue cards (Marie and Einstein were friends—where’s this movie?).

When Rena and Sara are not postulating theories and formulating equations, they are discussing the merits of child performers with hair darker than the actor they grow into, the hotness of various nuclear scientists on film throughout history, how Marie and Pierre were essentially X Men given their constant exposure to radiation like it was NBD, and the struggle of the meet-cute in the modern age.

Radiation was directed by Marjane Satrapi, and stars Rosemund Pike as Marie Curie, Sam Riley as Pierre Curie, Simon Russell Beale as Professor Lippman, Drew Jacoby as Loie Fuller, and Aneurin Barnard as Paul Langevin.

Spoiler Warning: We spoil everything. And we enjoy it.

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