Silkwood THERE ARE very serious problems with Silkwood. As I keep having to say, you shouldn't make biographical films about contemporary persons unless you know the facts and are in a position to tell them. This, however, is very rarely the case,...

AT THE END of the new movie Silkwood, Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, dies in an automobile crash while en route to a meeting with a New York Times reporter; she is bearing documents revealing serious transgressions by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, a...

Yes, the ride is long, real long.That's the short answer to the first question they ask when you say you've been to Australia. It's about 14 hours from Los Angeles to Brisbane. For me, a few steps up and down the aisle, a few catnaps,...

Beauty wins Revlon endorsements. Ugly wins Oscars. Charlize Theron proved it, bloated and gruesome, as a lesbian serial killer in Monster. Now she’s out to prove it again as a single mother on welfare with broken nails and a battered face, slaving away in the...

One rather imagines that the people who undertook [the task of relating Karen Silkwood's story in the film] Silkwood may now wish they had waited until later. For rarely has the desperation to square inspirational myth with provable, nonlibelous reportage been more apparent. And rarely has the failure to do so been more dismaying. All they can say without fear of litigious contradiction is that there were obvious defects in the way plutonium was handled in the Crescent, Okla., plant that employed Kar...

[Dissatisfactions with Silkwood go past a number of problematical] matters of execution, bothersome as they are. The script by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen is a compound of compromise, alteration, and misleading implication—all serious matters in what purports to be a true story. (p. 24) I am not remotely competent to sift all the evidence in this matter, but as far as I can make out, no irrefutable proof of murder or document theft has yet been produced although much time has been spent in trying to ...