The Handmaid's Tale

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson) sees ...more

Although it's been criticized for being sterile and unfaithful to its source material, this cautionary tale is actually a pretty smart Orwell-ian update with a feminist twist and a lot of dead-on details. Screenwriter Harold Pinter and director Volker Schlondorff fill The Handmaid's Tale with all sorts of plausible fascist imagery and plenty of moments of paranoid dread. As Kate, the titular baby machine, Natasha Richardson revisits her timorous role in Patty Hearst, expressing normal human ...more