Iron Jawed Angels

Iron Jawed Angels relies on a disappointingly conventional script, one that delivers stock characters who have no dimensionality, and simplistic plot abbreviations that you'd find in a high school textbook.

The film celebrates freethinkers who made huge personal sacrifices to wage a critical battle for human rights, yet it does so by bowing to commercial orthodoxies and the meekest modern notions of womanhood.

Gussied up with a comically anachronistic use of period music on the soundtrack and flashy, MTV-style montage sequences, pic misguidedly strives - but ultimately fails -- to belie its instincts as an assembly-line movie-of-the-week.

It's a reminder that feminism is first of all about human rights.

Iron Jawed Angels is an important history lesson told in a fresh, and blazing fashion.

It's good to be reminded in an election year how hard and long women fought to win the vote.

Director Katja von Garnier's use of tricksy camerawork and modern-day music is rather jarring. But the script, if a little on the wordy side, is smart and sassy, and the performances are uniformly excellent.

Despite the film's anachronistic approach -- fast-tracking camera tricks and a soundtrack pulsating with contemporary musical numbers -- there's a lot to appreciate in Katja von Garnier's classy precursor to the recent (and less effective) "Suffragette."

A stunning true story unfortunately tarted up for modern audiences, infused with modern informalities, fictional romances and wildly incongruous post-feminist empowerment pop.