Radioactive

Radioactive (2020) is Marjane Satrapi's biopic of Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Rosamund Pike plays the scientist whose discoveries went on to both heal and kill on a vast scale.

Turn-of-the-century Paris, an unheated lab, a stubborn Polish émigré whom the male establishment keeps shutting out. There she meets Pierre (Sam Riley) — first a research partner, then a husband. Together they isolate two new elements and hand the world a word it still uses: radioactivity. Satrapi refuses a tidy timeline; she keeps cutting forward to where the work leads — an X-ray in a wartime ward, a beam aimed at a tumour, and the flash over Hiroshima.

Adapted from Lauren Redniss's graphic novel, the film rests on Pike, who plays Curie without the textbook varnish — prickly, in love, hard to like. Anya Taylor-Joy turns up as her daughter Irène. Worth a look for anyone who wants a science story with no museum dust, the cost stitched into every breakthrough. Stream Radioactive (2020) online on iFILM.