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A biopic that stumbles through history wearing a feminist sandwich board and an Instagram filter, Radioactive is as subtle as a Geiger counter in meltdown.

In her now-familiar mode of "ice queen with a chip on her shoulder," Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie as an arrogant loner who seems to loathe humanity almost as much as she loves radiation. She stares down everyone as if they were unworthy lab rats, making her swoony romance with Pierre Curie feel about as convincing as a Bunsen burner wedding.

Are we really to believe that this Marie, who would sooner gargle radium than share credit, would fall for a man?

The film's structure, meanwhile, is a mess: awkward flash-forwards to Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and American cancer wards serve less as commentary and more as clumsy guilt trips. The real kicker? The pilots of the Enola Gay are labeled "criminals," as if the movie suddenly remembered it had a moral axe to grind and ran out of nuance.

Marie's refusal to enter a hospital due to childhood trauma might have been touching if it didn't make her look like a hysterical toddler instead of a world-class scientist. Watching a woman who cracked the secrets of the atom reduced to a sulking child is less poignant than it is pathetic.

The final cherry on the cake is the obligatory hat-tip to xenophobia and sexism, just in case you hadn't yet gathered that society was (is?) unfair.

Radioactive wants to be an ode to a pioneering woman, but ends up playing like a sanctimonious TED Talk spliced with a perfume ad. You leave not inspired, but irradiated.

Donnie Brasco features two famously operatic actors - Depp and Pacino -playing it unexpectedly low-key, as if someone finally told them that not every scene requires jazz hands. Mercifully, it works. Even more miraculous: the film doesn't slobber over its gangsters. This isn't one of those Scorsese fever dreams where you're expected to be dazzled by sociopaths in silk shirts.

Pacino's Lefty is a washed-up underling, a mob benchwarmer who's been "one step away from the big time" for about three decades. He lives the kind of humdrum life most middle-class folks endure, except he occasionally whacks people instead of filling out tax forms. He's not glamorous, he's not tragic, he's just... tired.

Depp plays Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, an undercover FBI agent juggling a mafia infiltration and a domestic implosion. His wife and daughters are losing patience while he's out playing mob cosplay. Depp does a fine job, though he's a bit too zen for someone living two lives on the edge of collapse. DiCaprio, in The Departed, did this kind of role with more panic and sweat.

The heart of the story is the odd, slow-motion car crash of a friendship between Lefty and Donnie, who make a misguided attempt to reinvent themselves in Miami, only to be sabotaged by a tragic tag team: the local mafia and the FBI, both equally incompetent. Eventually, the Bureau yanks Donnie out before he goes full method and tries to save his sad old mob buddy.

Even if it leans into the usual "good guy blurs into bad guy" motif with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it's still worth watching for its grubby, stripped-down portrayal of organized crime, not as a glamorous empire, but as a dead-end job with bloodstains.

Set during the brutal days of October 1973, with flash-forwards to 1974, Golda is a powerful, claustrophobic portrait of an aging and ailing leader - shaped by a brutal past - who must confront a massive, coordinated attack from neighboring countries bent on the destruction of her nation.

Helen Mirren gives a restrained yet tragic performance as a woman who may have wondered whether her pain would ever end. And yet, with remarkable strength and an utter lack of sentimentality, she manages to steer Israel out of a black pit.

Truly heartbreaking are the scenes of Golda listening to the slaughter of young soldiers, powerless to intervene. There's a passing but chilling reference to the countless acts of brutality, torture, and physical abuse committed by Syrian and Egyptian forces against Israeli prisoners of war, clear violations of the Geneva Convention, and barely acknowledged.

The entire film is haunting, beautifully shot, and never heavy-handed. Its symbolic imagery is spare and well-placed. One of the most devastating moments comes when Golda and her assistant must inform a secretary of her son's death, a scene rendered without a single word. No dialogue, no swelling strings, no sentimental cues, just the slow, unbearable gravity of what must be said, and what cannot ever be truly borne. Cinema distilled to its purest, most merciless form.

Leonard Cohen's "Who by Fire", played over the end credits - Cohen himself having visited the troops during the Yom Kippur War - delivers the final twist of the knife. A song of judgment, mourning, and memory. A perfect end to a film steeped in all three.