against her will movie review

Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story

Marlee Matlin (Carrie Buck) Melissa Gilbert (Melissa Prentice) Peter Frechette (Adam White) Pat Hingle (Arthur Kent) Joe Inscoe (Ian Strand) John Bennes (Governor Trinkle) James Martin Jr. (Campaign manager) Elaine Nalee (Alice Evans) Terry Loughlin (Joseph Evans) Sharyn Greene (Elizabeth Lake)

John David Coles

Carrie Buck is an intellectually-disabled young woman who is persuaded to fight against the courts for custody of her newborn daughter after being declared mentally incompetent, therefore unable to raise her own child by herself. She is also threatened with sterilization so she won't have any more children who might also be disabled.

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story

Film details, brief synopsis, cast & crew, melissa gilbert, trent mcdevitt, elaine nalee, sharyn greene, technical specs.

The true story of Carrie Buck, who becomes the test case for a landmark 1927 Supreme Court decision concerning the sterlization of mentally deficient women against their will.

Mark Jeffrey Miller

Michael lynn burgess, joanne pankow, james martin, john bennes, peter frechette.

Moses Gibson

J michael hunter, laddy sartin, tammy arnold.

Marlee Matlin

David lenthall, terry loughlin, angelo corrao, janet faust krusi, ron fortunato, robert girolami, myron hoffert, brian l ross, carl rudisill, maribeth solomon, fred weiler, frederic c weiler, miscellaneous notes.

Aired in United States October 5, 1994

Hearing-impaired actress Marlee Matlin portrays a character who is not deaf.

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story Reviews

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In 1924, a law student (Melissa Gilbert) tries to stop the forced sterilization of a woman (Marlee Matlin) classified as "feebleminded." Dr. Kent: Pat Hingle. Adam: Peter Frechette. Mrs. Evans: Elaine Nalee. Ian Strand: Joe Inscoe. Based on a true story.

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story (1994)

Genre: drama, duration: 120 minuten, country: united states, directed by: john david coles, stars: melissa gilbert , pat hingle and peter frechette, imdb score: 6,8  (541), releasedate: 5 october 1994.

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story plot

The story begins in 1924 in Virginia, when Melissa (Melissa Gilbert), a well-to-do law student, goes to stay with her uncle Arthur (Pat Hingle). He is a doctor and director of a psychiatric facility for epileptics and the mentally retarded and has already sterilized a hundred women. Melissa accidentally meets Carrie (Marlee Matlin), who as an unmarried mother is pregnant and therefore eligible for involuntary sterilization.

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Carrie Buck

Melissa Prentice

Arthur Kent

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story

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Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story is a 1994 American television drama film directed by John David Coles. The film aired on October 4, 1994 on the Lifetime network.

• 3 Production
• 4 Critical Reception

The film follows Carrie Buck (Marlee Matlin), an intellectually-disabled young woman who fights the courts for custody of her newborn daughter after she's declared mentally incompentent to take care of the baby on her own and is threatened with sterilization.

• Marlee Matlin as Carrie Buck
• Melissa Gilbert as Melissa Prentice
• Peter Frechette as Adam White
• Pat Hingle as Arthur Kent
• Joe Inscoe as Ian Strand
• John Bennes as Governor Trinkle
• Elaine Nalee as Alice Evans

Production [ ]

Filming for "Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story" took place in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Critical Reception [ ]

Variety magazine said: "Marlee Matlin broadens her repertoire with a showy portrayal of a woman who's not deaf in a TV movie based on a precedent-setting legal case; Melissa Gilbert stays within her established range as the lawyer who ... well, who doesn't help very much at all."

Andy Webb of The Movie Scene wrote: Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story is hard hitting due to the subject matter and it certainly doesn't shy away from an ugly episode in America's history. But at the same time the cliche elements which are squeezed in to the movie end up sucking some of the power out of the story."

The New York Times said: "The film is in many ways a standard television movie: issues are spelled out laboriously, emotions are milked shamelessly. In this instance, however, the issues are genuinely unsettling and the emotions, delivered in strong performances by Melissa Gilbert and Marlee Matlin, are justifiable."

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Against Her Will The Carrie Buck Story (1994)

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Colors of Evil: Red’ on Netflix, A Polish Thriller About A Mother’s Search For Answers In Her Daughter’s Murder

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Colors of Evil: Red , now streaming on Netflix, is adapted from Kolory Zła: Czerwień , the first novel in a popular three-book series by Polish author Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. When a young woman is murdered in the coastal Baltic region of Poland, her mother, a prominent judge, teams with a prosecutor new to the area to discover what really happened. Because there are lots of questions that could seemingly be answered by the piles of evidence that nobody else is investigating. Colors of Evil: Red , directed by Adrian Panek and written by Panek and Łukasz M. Maciejewski, stars Maja Ostaszewski ( Broad Peak ), Jakub Gierszał ( The Getaway King ), and Zofia Jastrzębska ( Infamy ).      

COLORS OF EVIL: RED : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: When the manager of a Gdynia nightclub called Shipwreck asks why he should hire her as his new bartender, Monika (Jastrzębska) just says it’s because guys will line up to buy drinks – and drugs – from her. “On their knees.” It’s a bolt of confidence, and pretty soon she’s the club’s most popular attraction. But what she considers a lark – dating the manager, and helping him move party drugs on the side – just as quickly turns tragic. And when Monika’s mutilated body turns up on the beach, it’s up to rookie prosecutor Leopold Bilski (Gierszał) to not only break the bad news to her mother, Judge Helena Bogucka (Ostaszewski), but to try and build a case around Monika’s murder. And that’s damn difficult with his supervisor giving him the runaround and the assigned detectives going out of their way to be unhelpful.

Helena blames herself and her failing marriage to high-powered lawyer Roman (Andrzej Zieliński) for what befell Monika. They should have been more present in the life of their daughter. But the circumstances of her death are particularly grisly, and suggest she was the victim of a psychopath or sadistic serial killer. As Bilski works the case from his end, uncovering similarities between Monika’s murder and the deaths of other young women in Poland’s Tricity region, Helena’s frustrations with Roman boil over into suspicion. As it turns out, he’s listed as the legal counsel for Shipwreck, which is owned (through a shell company, of course) by a powerful local gangster named Łukasz (Przemyslaw Bluszcz). Why was her husband working for a mobster? And did Łukasz have something to do with Monika’s murder? 

Colors of Evil: Red builds in the pace of a police procedural as it moves along, and employs a flashback format that’s at its best when it helps us learn a little more about Monika as a person. There’s also a medical examiner (Andrzej Konopka) whose connection to Helena is more than professional, his creepy son who also knew Monika, and the matter of a red ruby ring, Helena’s mother’s, which Monika always wore in life. Now she’s dead, the ring is missing, nobody’s talking, and if Helena and Bilski aren’t careful, they might be next.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2021 film Operation Hyacinth featured a gritty period setting, solid procedural vibes, and a message in support of the Polish LGBTQ community. And The Plagues of Breslau echoed some of the mystery components and darker elements of the mayhem at work in Colors of Evil: Red .   

Performance Worth Watching: Maja Ostaszewski deserves more screen time in Colors of Evil , but she makes the most of what she has, with a ton of mileage earned from a series of ever more drawn looks. The specifics of Helena’s dissolving marriage to Roman go unspoken, but the mistakes they made are written all over Ostaszewski’s features.    

Memorable Dialogue: It is only in the terrible aftermath of their daughter’s murder that Helena and Roman can finally admit to each other how little they did to help her. “We failed her,” Helena tells him flatly. “We simply failed her.”  

Sex and Skin: Colors of Evil includes disturbing scenes of sexual violence and assault.

Our Take: As awful as Monika’s fate is in Colors of Evil: Red , her cause of death and the condition of her body are the kind of red flags that can signal a satisfying thriller/murder mystery. This film, though, is somewhat less than satisfying. It’s capably directed, and outside of its grim narrative, the shooting locations in Poland are spectacular. But while Helena and Bilski are each driven to solve the crime – justice for Monika, of course, but also because her death could very well be linked to larger patterns of police corruption – the characters are often left to simply react to whatever discoveries they make, and feed that information back into the same foreboding cul-de-sac. We go round and round with their investigation as they uncover bits of evidence and other intriguing morsels, but the fact is that what they uncover felt pretty obvious from the get-go. We want to root for them, and see that true justice gets done. But the payoffs in Colors of Evil: Red are too clear by far, and a couple of late twists make the whole thing feel protracted even further.    

Our Call: Skip It. Colors of Red: Evil is structurally sound as a thriller, and it includes a handful of good performances. But the primary colors of its plot bleed through too early for the suspense to really build.

Johnny Loftus ( @glennganges ) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.   

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Letitia Wright gives a quietly powerful performance in “Aisha” as a young Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland and struggling to overcome one bureaucratic obstacle after another. 

Writer-director Frank Berry ’s film never devolves into melodrama – if anything, it may be understated to a fault – but he grounds her plight in an authentic mixture of daily frustrations and sporadic joys. The absurdism of the consistent hardships she endures is maddening: An administrator at the accommodation center where she lives won’t hand her an important piece of mail she needs, so she misses the bus to her part-time job at a hair salon, where the owner scolds her for her tardiness. It’s that sort of thing, day in and day out. She just can't seem to catch a break. There’s racism behind some of these roadblocks, as well as a certain sadism. To borrow a phrase that’s been used repeatedly in recent years to describe the treatment of immigrants to America, the cruelty is the point. 

Nevertheless, Aisha perseveres. Wright, so funny and fierce in the “ Black Panther ” movies, harnesses that same fire here, indicating her character’s loneliness and anguish through her restrained body language and measured speech. We learn a little about the ordeal that drove her from her homeland through meetings with the immigration lawyer assigned to her case (Loran Cranitch). Still, she’s understandably reluctant to revisit these horrors in detail. Wright gives us just enough to sympathize but not enough for the indifferent officials who will determine her character’s fate. 

It’s not all misery, though. We catch early glimpses of the warm and easy way Aisha connects with people as an aspiring beautician -- putting makeup on the other women in the group home and drawing out their smiles by helping them feel lovely for an afternoon. Berry immerses us in the rhythms of Aisha’s daily existence, the highs and lows, with long takes and unobtrusive, documentary-style camerawork. A Muslim woman, Aisha wakes up early every morning to pray, and these solitary moments in the stillness seem to sustain her.  

This fly-on-the-wall approach becomes especially crucial when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Conor (Josh O’Connor), a new overnight security guard at the center who serves as the rare source of kindness in her life. Berry lets us sit in silence with them as they exchange an unspoken understanding over midnight meals in the industrial kitchen, and their small talk on the bus eventually evolves into good-natured teasing and even laughter.  

O’Connor, who’s so hot right now between two extremely different roles in “ Challengers ” and “ La Chimera ,” reveals another facet of his talent here. Gone is the swagger of those performances; with his big, goofy smile, Conor exudes a hangdog tenderness and an earnest desire to atone for the sins of his past. O’Connor is so effortlessly appealing and sweet, he makes you wish there were more to his character. Conor is almost too good to be true in the way he shows up for Aisha, no matter the time of day, no matter where she's living once the system forces her to relocate. Still, whether they can forge some lasting relationship provides another source of simmering tension on top of the central question of whether Aisha can remain in the country. As the film progresses, Berry increasingly depicts her isolation, framing her alone at a bus stop or on the sidewalk in front of a small-town supermarket. 

Unfortunately for Aisha – and so many others, as “Aisha” convincingly conveys – there are no quick and easy answers. The film’s abrupt but realistic ending, which surely will feel unsatisfying for many viewers, seems to suggest as much. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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‘Ezra’: Robert De Niro and an A-List Cast Can’t Save This Sappy Film

Bobby Cannavale, Rose Byrne, and Robert De Niro headline Tony Goldwyn’s new movie “Ezra,” which is tender but trying.

Isaac Feldberg

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What’s a heavyweight cast like that—Bobby Cannavale, Rose Byrne, Robert De Niro , Whoopi Goldberg , Vera Farmiga, Rainn Wilson from The Office —doing in a melodramatic misfire like this?

Ezra has its heart in the right place, but that’s the best that can be said about Tony Goldwyn’s strained family drama, which lacks trust in the intrinsic power of its depiction of parents raising a 11-year-old who is neurodiverse, stacking the audience’s sympathies with a manipulative story of parental abduction, cross-country road trips, and Jimmy Kimmel Live , squandering goodwill as it goes.

Cannavale stars as New York comedy writer Max, who’s pursuing a career in stand-up but can scarcely get through his sets at the Comedy Cellar without self-sabotaging. That the jokes we hear him deliver are the types of groaners you’d never expect to leave the safety of a writer’s notepad (“I met my inner child, and he had a gun”) is par for the course with a character who’s at the mercy of his own compulsions, either oblivious to his impact on others or unable to get out of his own way.

Max struggles to connect with Ezra (newcomer William A. Fitzgerald), the son he shares with estranged ex-wife Jenna (Byrne), even as he rejects out of hand the suggestion that anyone else knows the best way to reach his kid, who’s been acting out at school. When, at a parent-teacher conference, Ezra’s teachers discuss their recommendation that he be medicated and sent to a special-needs school, Max reacts at first angrily then violently, even assaulting the principal in his response to the idea that his son might be out of control. After Ezra becomes distressed and ends up in the hospital, Max again loses his temper and winds up in jail for the night, putting his ability to see his son at risk.

Robert De Niro, Bobby Cannavale, William A. Fitzgerald

And so Max makes another rash decision, absconding with Ezra and traveling from New Jersey to California, where he’s landed the opportunity to audition for Kimmel . Along the way, he hopes he’ll be able to bond with his son and reach a deeper understanding of their relationship, even as Max’s father, Stan (De Niro), joins Jenna—and, after she reports what happened to law enforcement, a handful of police officers—in setting out on the road to track them down and bring Ezra home.

In mainly centering his story on the relationship between Max and Ezra, screenwriter Tony Spiridakis (who drew upon his firsthand experiences of raising a child on the autism spectrum) captures the beautiful chaos of parenting but devotes as much time, if not more, to Max’s personal journey toward accepting both his son and himself.

Your mileage may vary with Ezra based on your ability to get on board with Max as a character. As wonderful as Cannavale often is in the role, summoning great depths of anxiety and helpless emotion to the surface in seconds, the character’s reckless endangerment of his son starts early and seldom lets up. But the filmmakers are committed to getting you on Max’s side, often at the expense of common sense; when their road trip leads them to old friends, played first by Wilson then Farmiga, Max jovially informs them he’s on the run from the police and is rewarded for his honesty, with both warmly advocating that he’s in the right for taking his relationship with Ezra into his own hands.

Jenna, meanwhile, is berated by just about every other character in the film, especially Stan, for her role in making it harder for Max to see Ezra. Stan even goes so far as to exclaim that she’s responsible for making Max kidnap his son; when he eventually catches up with Max, it’s not to talk sense into him but to weepily apologize for his own failings as a father, a scene that De Niro handles with more poignancy and grace than it deserves.

It should be said that Fitzgerald, an actor who is on the autism spectrum, is Ezra ’s best defense against its story’s more histrionic impulses. At once wise beyond his years and wildly impulsive, Ezra is a chaotic source of energy in his parents’ lives, as likely to spout extensive movie quotes from memory as he is to blurt out the punchline of Max’s set before he has time to deliver it, and Fitzgerald brings the character off the page with an immediate confidence and attention to detail that extends to his easy, believable chemistry with Cannavale.

It’s just a shame that these performances, all well-meaning and delivered by pros, are trapped within such a contrived, thinly sketched outline of a film. Ezra tugs clumsily at the heartstrings. It would take a heartless cynic not to be moved by small beats in which fathers and sons envelop one another in tender embraces that say more than their words ever could, just as it would take a total sap not to resent the strain of mawkish sentimentality that pervades most everything else on screen.

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When Edgar fails to arrive at school, Ledroit is put on the case. Still haunted by a lost Black teen, Ledroit is driven to get the Andersons a different outcome. This is no easy feat in a city determined to discard what is deemed unsavory, and everyone involved with the case is hiding something. As Ledroit chases down leads, slowed by inadequate technology, red tape and his own pain, the horrors of NYC’s government policies come to light. It becomes clear that misconduct and violence at the highest levels are complicit in harming the city’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

Ultimately, “Eric” is about much more than a missing boy. The series revolves around corruption and inhumanity, topics that will thunder in the viewer’s mind long after the final episode. Disturbing but profound, the show asks why only certain people are allowed happy endings and what that means for those who won’t ever see justice.

“Eric” premieres May 30 on Netflix .

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