Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge

There’s a lot of labor and conflict shown here, and rarely have they looked so good.

As biopics go, Marie Curie is a beautifully rendered sketch, rather than a fully detailed painting.

Marie Noelle fills the story with passion, debate and human contradiction. If the material ultimately eludes the director’s grasp, wandering off on unfocused tangents, it’s because of its ambition.

Marie Noelle’s evidently impassioned portrait of the trailblazing Polish-French physicist and chemist emerges as an odd blend of, well, formulae, following a starchy biopic pattern one minute and giving in to impressionistic abstraction the next.

A fascinating life is reduced to a series of skittishly edited and visually stylised vignettes that do scant justice to Marie Curie's scientific achievements and Karolina Gruszka's laudably intense performance.

A curiously downbeat, rather cold work without much passion or science that portrays a woman whose life was brimming with both.