movie review i tonya

You probably haven’t thought about Tonya Harding much recently. Truly, why would you? The Olympic figure skater reached the height of her fame nearly a quarter century ago for something that didn’t even happen on the ice: the notorious attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, orchestrated by Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, just before the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit.

Even though Harding wasn’t personally involved in the infamous, injurious leg-whacking, she may as well have been, her reputation and career were so irreparably damaged. She became a punchline, her name alone providing a bitter shorthand for scandal.

All of which makes “I, Tonya” such a wonder. Not only will it make you think about Tonya Harding again, it will make you do so with unexpected sympathy. It will make you feel for her, deeply, for the abuse and pain she’s suffered for so much of her life. Director Craig Gillespie pulls off what would seem to be an impossible high-wire act: He’s made a movie that’s affectionately mocking—of this theatrical sport, of the idiots who surrounded Harding, of this hideous moment in fashion and pop culture—without actually mocking Harding herself.

Steven Rogers ’ script shows great kindness and emotional charity for this wounded figure, even as it tells her story through a whirlwind of unreliable narrators. It’s “ GoodFellas ” on ice—darkly comic and often just plain dark, but always breathtakingly alive. Despite the colorful glitz and cheese of the figure-skating setting, “I, Tonya” has an unmistakably tumultuous air from the very start. And at the center of the storm is Margot Robbie in the performance of a lifetime as Harding.

Robbie has steadily shown keen insight in the roles she’s chosen, a hunger for the challenge of meaty material and a clear drive to prove she’s so much more than just a beautiful face. Whether it’s as the va-va-voomy siren of “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” (which put her on the map), the smooth scam artist of “Focus,” the bat-wielding bad-ass Harley Quinn in “ Suicide Squad ” or the noble frontier woman of “ Z for Zachariah ,” Robbie has dazzled us with her versatility, even as she’s consistently held us with her charismatic screen presence. Here, she’s got the requisite swagger of an athlete at the top of her sport (and even learned to skate for the part), but it’s tinged with sadness as we the see the low sense of self-worth buried underneath—the result of years of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her cruel mother.

Allison Janney absolutely tears it up as the profane, chain-smoking LaVona Harding, constantly insulting Tonya and messing with her mind in the name of making her a champion. It’s a showy, scenery-chewing performance but it’s not one-note; Janney brings an undercurrent of sorrow to the part in revealing LaVona’s twisted methodology.

But Tonya was doomed never to receive an enthusiastic embrace from the figure skating elite because she and her mother didn’t fit their superficial, socioeconomic ideals. That’s an element of Harding’s story that “I, Tonya” depicts incisively; it’s one of the key components to her tragic downfall, but it also makes her story relatable beyond the insular world of figure skating. Growing up poor in Portland, Oregon, with her frizzy ponytail and poofy, homemade costumes, Harding struggled to look the part of the pristine ice queen—something Kerrigan achieved effortlessly. Even though Harding was an extraordinarily athletic female skater—one of a rare few to this day to land a triple axel cleanly in competition—U.S. judges often didn’t give her the scores she deserved because she didn’t adhere to the image they wanted to project.

When Harding married the first man who was nice to her—at least, at first—she went from one abusive situation to another because it felt familiar, if nothing else. Sebastian Stan initially plays the part of Jeff Gillooly with a hint of benign goofiness. He’s a sleaze ball in a turtleneck and a porn mustache. But as his violent side emerges and his emotional hold on Tonya strengthens, he’s positively chilling—and your heart breaks for her all over again, because you know that no matter where she goes, she’s trapped.

Under those circumstances, it’s a miracle she could get out on the ice merely to practice, much less compete at the absolute highest echelons of the sport. And the more we learn about her life, the more it becomes sadly clear that the odds were always stacked against her.

In interviews both recreated and imagined, Gillespie depicts her rise and fall from a variety of competing perspectives and contradictory voices. (Editor Tatiana S. Riegel keeps the film moving at a propulsive pace.) We hear from Harding herself; an increasingly abrasive LaVona; Harding’s genteel coach, Diane ( Julianne Nicholson ); a squirmy Gillooly; and Gillooly’s delusional pal, Shawn Eckhardt ( Paul Walter Hauser ), Harding’s self-appointed “bodyguard” and the mastermind of what everyone bitterly refers to as “ The Incident .”

Taken together, they create a picture that isn’t exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. What “I, Tonya” does provide honestly, though, is a vivid slice of pop culture history—an irresistible, soapy mix of jealousy, competition and class warfare, fortified by powerful performances and unexpected emotional resonance.

Given the gripping, heightened reality of this stranger-than-fiction tale, it’s frustrating that Gillespie has chosen so many on-the-nose soundtrack selections to punctuate particular moments. “Devil Woman” by Cliff Richard starts up as LaVona barks orders on the ice at a young Tonya, played with convincing angst and heartache by Mckenna Grace . Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” plays during a beautifully fluid sequence in which Harding finally finds the guts to leave Gillooly and her volatile life with him behind. Great songs, all, but the classic rock needle drops can be distractingly obvious.

Still, that’s a minor deduction in an otherwise nearly flawless program. “I, Tonya” is one of the year’s best films.

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 .

Allison Janney as LaVona Golden
Caitlin Carver as Nancy Kerrigan
Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding
Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly
Julianne Nicholson as Diane Rawlinson
Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt
Craig Gillespie

Cinematographer

Nicolas Karakatsanis
Peter Nashel
Steven Rogers
Tatiana S. Riegel

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Review: ‘I, Tonya.’ I, Punching Bag. I, Punch Line.

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By Manohla Dargis

Dec. 6, 2017

The subject of “I, Tonya” — a winking, eager-to-please, fictionalized gloss on the disgraced ice skater Tonya Harding — gets roughed up a lot. As a child, she is degraded and smacked around by her mother, who kicks little Tonya’s chair so violently the kid flies off it. When the teenage Tonya gets involved with the man she will marry, her life as a punching bag continues. Her husband smashes her head onto a glass surface so hard that shards scatter; he bloodies her nose a few times. He also points a gun at Tonya, threatening to kill her. Despite all the beatings and blood, “I, Tonya” insists it’s a comedy.

The real Tonya Harding went from fame to infamy in 1994 , after she was implicated in an attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a rival. On Jan. 6, after practicing for the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Ms. Kerrigan was attacked by a man who thwacked her leg with a collapsible police baton. (He seems to have been going for her knee.) A camera captured Ms. Kerrigan on the ground as she repeatedly wailed “Why?” Ms. Harding went on to win the championship; it was a short-lived victory. The F.B.I. was soon questioning her, her ex-husband and their dumb-and-dumber associates. By June , Ms. Harding had been barred from competing for her role in the attack.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘I, Tonya’

The director craig gillespie narrates a sequence from his film featuring margot robbie as tonya harding..

Hi. I’m Craig Gillespie and I’m the director of “I, Tonya.” So this is the first skating sequence in the movie that we get to see Tonya Harding skate. And it’s young in her career. And she’s more aggressive and a little unruly and unpredictable. So there’s four major skating sequences in the film and they each have different styles. This one we wanted the camera to be more aggressive and reflect where her energy was at the time. So we actually have a steadicam operator, Dana Morris, who turned out to be, fortunate for us, a very amazing skater. So he’s skating here on skates handheld. And he’s backwards sometimes, sometimes he’s forward. He comes in here, wraps around her. Margot had trained for this sequence for five months and then we had two professional skaters training as well. And each one of these moments is broken down to who could do what. Obviously, Margot can’t do a lot of these big skating moves. Amazingly, she was able to do the dance moves, you know, which is the opening of this with all the spinning and the kicks. And then it becomes a very complicated situation of head replacement. But all of these shots are handheld. And he would skate along. And it’s shot on film, compounding it. Because on film, you know, the focus is by eye. So we have our focus puller having to judge these distances as we go in and out close to our skaters throughout this sequence. And it certainly was stressful in that way. A lot of these pieces we had to do actually with no time. We had — I think it was 2/3 of our day was allocated to doing the sequence. And this was all part of routines that Tonya Harding had done during that period of ‘86 through ‘88. And she had actually skated ZZ Top. But once we got into each move which had been rehearsed and prepped for five months, we were a little more spontaneous. Because Dana was on skates and we could look at the move and he could be like alright, so I’ll come around. I’ll keep coming in the opposite direction here. And let’s try and meet her right as she finishes it. And you know, each time it would be slightly different, but we’d have all the pieces that we could put together.

Energetically directed by Craig Gillespie, “I, Tonya” charts the hard-won rise and calamitous fall of its title character (Margot Robbie). Taking the form of a mock, mocking documentary, one that disjointedly swings between heehaw comedy and wincing agony, the movie establishes its raised-eyebrow tone with a title card stating it’s “Based on irony-free, wildly contradictory and totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly,” her former husband. (The screenwriter, Steven Rogers, has said that he spoke with both.) From their separate corners, the middle-aged, long-divorced Tonya and Jeff (Sebastian Stan), provide linked, at times vividly contradictory accounts of what happened.

In one location, Jeff sits facing the camera in front of a large window framed by photo-covered walls. There’s a lot more visual coding going on with Tonya, who’s plunked down at a table in a modest kitchen wearing a pale jeans jacket and cowboy boots. Lank blond hair and bangs border her face; her neck has gone puffy. Looking into the camera, she occasionally draws on a cigarette and crosses her legs, one big, down-home, country-gal ankle resting on a knee. The real eye-catchers are the dirty dishes stacked in the sink behind her. They stay put and stay dirty, which seems curiously sloppy given that Tonya, a media veteran, is here to tell her truth. If you didn’t know she had a reputation as down-and-dirty, here’s a hint.

As Tonya and Jeff offer up alternating stories, her past, her abuse and her triumphs come into view. The only daughter of an unhappily married couple, the young Tonya is a daddy’s girl. Her father takes her hunting, teaching her how to shoot rabbit. Her awful mother, LaVona (Allison Janney, chilled and excellent), is the one who arranges for Tonya to take lessons with a skating coach (Julianne Nicholson). Tonya turns out to be a prodigy and is soon powering her way into the top echelon of the sport, despite the snobbery and visible discomfort of the judges who favor froufrou femininity over aggressive competition. They want gliding princesses, not grunting athletes like Tonya.

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Film Review: ‘I, Tonya’

Margot Robbie gives a delectable performance as Tonya Harding in a biopic that saves her from infamy by being cheeky but real.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ I , Tonya ,” a riff on the Tonya Harding saga starring Margot Robbie as the infamous figure skater the whole world decided it loved to hate, is a fresh, chancy, and wickedly enjoyable movie. It’s framed as a fake documentary (it opens with the characters being interviewed 20 years later), and it has a tone of poker-faced goofball Americana that suggests a biopic made by the Coen brothers. The movie revels in the sheer woeful ghastly comic horror of what went on during the lead-up to the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer — the smashed knee of Nancy Kerrigan, the whole scheme to undermine her that was even more cracked.

For a while, you may make the mistake of thinking that “I, Tonya” is a joke: a blithe spoof of Tabloid Nation. It is that, yet it’s also built around something piercingly sharp and sincere: Margot Robbie’s canny, live-wire, deeply sympathetic performance. In case there was any doubt (some might say “Who knew?”), she’s a major actress. She plays Tonya as a trash princess who has nothing to cling to but her passion to skate, and has been so abused by life that it’s her karma to abuse it back.

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That the film has chosen a person of such cheesy notoriety as its heroine may sound like the height of dramatic irony. But Tonya Harding was, and is, a figure of rather innocent dreams who became an outcast, and her story — her real story — has more layers than you think. Ever since the ’70s, American movies have been full of scoundrels, hoodlums, and sociopaths who do all kinds of outrageous and indefensible things, but just about all of them are men, and even their worst behavior gets held up to the light as a mirror of our own darkness. I’m thinking of characters like Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets,” Sonny in “Dog Day Afternoon,” Paul Snider in “Star 80,” or Dirk Diggler in “Boogie Nights.” “I, Tonya,” in its lightly impervious yet inquiring way, presents Tonya Harding as the female heir to all those holy paragons of disreputability. It’s about time we had a world-class feminine lowlife to root for, and this, at long last, is that movie.

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It’s a serious blast, with a plot that zigs and zags (but only because it sticks, within reason, to the facts), and a cast of characters who are so eccentrically scuzzy that maybe no one could have dreamed them up. When Tonya is three, she’s taken to a skating class in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, by her hard-bitten waitress of a mother, LaVona ( Allison Janney ), who is really a monster. She pushes the little girl out onto the ice, where Tonya is happy enough, but this mother won’t stop pushing, and the terror of it is that every thought she has is a punitive whiplash of negative energy.

Allison Janney, with cropped hair and big glasses, her face a scowl of displeasure as she blows out smoke from thin brown cigarettes, keeps spewing rapid-fire lines of toxic obscenity and ire like “I’m a gardener who wants to be a flower. How f—-ed am I?” She makes you chuckle — often — yet just because her performance is funny doesn’t meant that it’s not serious. Janney enters the soul of the kind of parent who’s a drive-by destroyer, molding her child, almost by design, into someone who will never believe in herself.

It’s parenting as a form of barely repressed competition and vengeance, yet LaVona, a mentally warped stage mother, shapes Tonya in one defining way. Figure skating, as a kind of athletic finishing school for girls, is designed to be a princess contest — it’s not just about skating, it’s about projecting an image that goes back to the “good girl” tropes of the ’40s and ’50s. LaVona has a pathology about not fitting in. She doesn’t want to pay for upscale frilly costumes, but really, she’s too much of a poison pill to play by the rules that others set; she’d rather set herself, and her daughter, apart. It’s a projection of her misanthropy, but the result is that Tonya, an only child who likes trucks and chopping wood, grows up to be a heavy-metal figure skater from white-trash hell.

When Robbie takes over the role, she looks a little sleeker than the real Tonya Harding, who has a scrunchy neurotic grin, but she nails Tonya’s skittery insecurity, and the freedom she feels on the ice. Robbie did portions of her own skating, and the scenes are thrillingly staged and shot. In one, Tonya comes out in a purple costume with a white swirl that looks like something off a customized sports car, and she’s her own thing — a badass rock ‘n’ roll sprite. Her grand feat, of course, is the triple axel: an awesomely extended spin through the air that she was the first American figure skater to bring off at an international event. When she’s up there, she’s flying — she transcends her identity as an outsider/victim.

Part of the film’s drama — almost its morality — is that Tonya, though a highly successful skater who starts to compete in national championships, gets lower scores than she deserves, and the judges, at several points, come out and admit that it’s about factors besides skating — what they call “presentation.” But that’s just code for conventionality, for wanting to sell a homogenized image of America on the Olympic level. It has nothing to do with what any of this is supposed to be about — skating — and that lends Tonya a streak of rebel realness.

That’s the good side of her contempt for respectability. The bad side is that she falls for Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), a loser in a sardine mustache who’s nice enough to Tonya — when he isn’t punching her in the face. Their relationship isn’t portrayed as one of those hellacious ones in which the abuser keeps the abused under his thumb by threatening her. Sebastian Stan makes Jeff a bumpkin with a mean streak, and Tonya, no matter how much she gets slapped around, simply won’t cut him loose; she marries him, and leaves him, and keeps coming back. The movie is sharp enough to suggest that she feels the echo of her mother’s hatred in every slap, and she can’t give that up. She’s addicted to what she thinks she deserves.

The director, Craig Gillespie, made “Lars and the Real Girl” (which I despised), but here, working from a script by Steven Rogers, he works in quick blithe scenes that sketch in a community, from Tonya’s soft-hearted figure-skating teacher, Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson), to Jeff’s pal Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), a pop conspiracy theorist who is so gently out-to-lunch that you can hear him, in his stoned conversation, pioneering the rudiments of fake-news culture. As the Olympics approach, it’s Shawn who Jeff taps for a scheme to send letters to Nancy Kerrigan in order to intimidate her. When the orders are passed to someone even lower down on the boob chain, it comes out as: Whack Nancy in the knee! There’s no larger meaning to what the film calls “the incident.” It just…happens.

Tonya Harding had almost nothing to do with it, yet the attack on Nancy Kerrigan played out, on the global media stage, as an explosion of her festering class resentment and insecurity, which was all too real. And she paid the price. She had much more than 15 minutes of infamy. She saw her life reduced to a punchline, and once the whole thing went through the courts, she was banned from competitive skating forever. In one of the most piquant moments of “I, Tonya,” Tonya sits in the kitchen during her present-day interview and confesses that she grew up being abused, then found an abusive husband, then found the ultimate abusers: all of us. She became our punching bag. But “I, Tonya” returns her to being what she always was: a great skater, and a human being with a dream of downscale flash that wouldn’t quit until it was pried away from her by the world.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), Sept. 8, 2017. Running time: 121 MIN.

Production: An IA Films production. Producers: Bryan Unkeless, Steven Rogers, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerly. Executive producers: Len Blavatnik, Aviv Giladi, Vince Holden, Toby Hill, Craig Gillespie, Zanne Devine, Rosanne Korenberg.
Crew: Director: Craig Gillespie. Screenplay: Steven Rogers. Camera (color, widescreen): Nicolas Karakatsanis. Editor: Tatiana S. Riegel.
With: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale.

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What Is Cinema?

I, Tonya Review: Margot Robbie Makes a Powerful Case for Tonya Harding, American Icon

Early on in I, Tonya , a character describes Tonya Harding as being “like America”—as in, a handful, but also a force of nature that demands respect. Filled with voiceover, direct address to the camera, and occasional freeze-frames on its most dramatic moments, I, Tonya frequently risks that kind of over-explanation as it recounts one of the most famous tabloid stories of the 90s, a saga that has been explained to death over the past two decades. But, yes: like America, Tonya Harding continues to fascinate—particularly as played by a gripping and forceful Margot Robbie , who commands a film that sometimes feels like a mad dash through a story so absurd and tawdry it just has to be true.

Robbie plays Harding from ages 15 to 47, through fights and tears and triple axels and multiple awful wigs. Robbie doesn’t look quite enough like Harding to transform into her, but the brutal, bitter energy she brings defines the film, from the moment she skates into frame as 15-year-old Harding and hip-checks another girl on the ice. Raised by an acid-tongued single mother ( Allison Janney —much more on her later) in a part of Portland, Oregon that’s more Winter’s Bone than Portlandia , Tonya says from the start she’s a redneck, and proud of it. But she’s also been skating since she was three years old, and constantly looking upward into a genteel world—represented by her impeccably coiffed skating coach (Julianne Nicholson) —that, no matter how much talent she shows, just doesn’t want to let her in.

I, Tonya begins with a title card that promises a film based on “irony-free, wildly contradictory” interviews with the major players in Tonya’s life, particularly about the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan that was cooked up by Tonya’s ex-husband Jeff Gillolly ( Sebastian Stan ) and three ludicrously dumb friends. Those present-day interviews are re-created documentary style. Director Craig Gillespie gleefully toggles between them and the main story, while also allowing his characters to continue talking to the camera. (“He beat the shit out of me,” Tonya tells us about Jeff, as we watch him slam her face into a glass picture frame.)

All that flourish, plus a soundtrack jam-packed with 80s hair metal, gives I, Tonya a busy energy that can’t help but flag as the story unfolds—and often risks overshadowing its excellent, quieter moments, when the characters stop trying to explain themselves and just get down to the business of being. Its tonal shifts can also be jarring, particularly when depicting Tonya’s abuse at the hands of both her mother and husband.

But Tonya Harding is a series of human tonal shifts. The film’s present-day interviews, remarkably similar to the ones seen in the 2014 30 for 30 documentary The Price of Gold , show a woman resigned to her fate as a tabloid spectacle, amused by her lingering fame, and furious about the terrible hand she drew. As summed up by a Hard Copy producer played by (who else?) a spray-tanned Bobby Cannavale , Tonya’s story—and especially the Kerrigan attack—is full of laughable dolts. There’s no retelling it without a level of comedy or outright farce. But I, Tonya , in no small part thanks to Robbie’s fearsome performance, still maintains the raw, broken, human story at its center. The close-ups of Robbie’s face in the skating scenes (accomplished with occasionally sketchy face-replacement CGI) say it all: there are fleeting moments of victory that feel like everything, and then a whole lot of garbage surrounding it.

I, Tonya debuted at Toronto on Friday night without a distributor in place; speculation about a possible bidding war after the effusive debut screening soon followed. The film is not as obvious an awards play as much of the TIFF lineup, with its commitment to dark comedy and lack of clear resolution. (Its message might best be summed up as “Fuck you, I’m still here.”) But I, Tonya features two powerful performances that should continue to drive conversation: those of Robbie, who may be showing us her remarkable power only four years after breaking out in The Wolf of Wall Street , and Allison Janney, who leaps fearlessly into a character as direly unsympathetic as any movie villain, then makes her hilarious.

Essentially an expanded, darker version of her bawdy trailer park character in Drop Dead Gorgeous , Janney’s LaVona is, in her own way, a classic stage mom. She pushes her daughter, puts all her money into her career, and waits rinkside—cigarette and whiskey flask in hand—to watch her every move. But she also hits, and berates, and in one pin-drop scene throws a steak knife at her daughter. She never smiles, or softens, or even allows that what she did is beyond the tough love that any kid needs sometimes. She also drops profane one-liners that bring the house down. The scenes in which Robbie and Janney go at each other, or even glare at one another from across the ice, are the most powerful in I, Tonya , and there are far too few of them. But while the film sometimes feels busy and scattered, Janney and Robbie are vivid anchors, diving into the kind of complicated, boundary-pushing characters that, let’s face it, are usually the domain of men onscreen.

With its Shakespeare-lite title and the mere sight of Robbie in puffed-up bangs, I, Tonya risks looking like a mockery of its subject, a woman it depicts being beaten and disrespected for her entire life. More than a few critics here in Toronto have already argued that it’s complicit in Harding’s continued cultural defamation. But when Robbie’s performance works—and how can it not?—it lets you into Harding’s view of her own life, comedy and tragedy irrevocably intertwined. It’s O.K. to laugh, and maybe eventually cry. It’s what Tonya would do.

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I, Tonya Reviews

Craig Gillespie’s ambitious direction and self-awareness made I, Tonya a refreshing and hysterical look at Tonya Harding’s life and what drove the events of her downfall.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2024

Brimming with depravity and teaming with talent, "I, Tonya" may be the brashest film you will see seen this year and, quite frankly, one of the downright best as well.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 4, 2023

…isn’t a feminist polemic, but a serious-minded black-comedy…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 1, 2023

I, Tonya is wildly entertaining and well made.

Full Review | Apr 26, 2023

Both Robbie and Allison Janney are excellent, and the film’s frisky style is pretty much Scorsese on ice.

Full Review | Jan 23, 2023

Margot Robbie and director Craig Gillespie do the impossible: they turn Tonya Harding, 1994's most vilified American, into a sympathetic figure. My #2 movie of 2017.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 4, 2022

The result is one part Tonya's personal truth of the events, one part reveling in junk food news, and another part media critique. Still, the joys of this film should not be understated.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 16, 2022

I, Tonya is a wickedly funny and equally depressing piece of cinema that has a lot more on its mind than most fluffier biopics.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 29, 2021

I, Tonya adopts the right tone to relate the factual tale of the whacked kneecap, spinning it in a darkly comedic direction.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 31, 2021

There's great heart in Margot Robbie taking on a national joke, a secondhand villain, and turning her into a quiet hero.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2021

I, Tonya is far from your typical biopic, and it's all the better for it. Buoyed by sharp, fun storytelling and Oscar-worthy performances, it's exactly the type of movie this story deserved.

Full Review | May 26, 2021

Margot Robbie finally gets a role to match her talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 29, 2021

It's messy, but this is a messy story about a woman who paid a heavy price for daring to be herself. Not conforming cost her everything but you get a sense, by the end of the film, it's a price she was willing to pay.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 3, 2021

Comedy-drama documentary about the rise and fall of Tonya Harding, the American figure-skater. It sounds like a simple sports biopic, and honestly, the story is much more complex.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 28, 2021

Humor is abundant in many of the establishing scenes, though they weave between sequences of emotional poignancy.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 5, 2020

Robbie, Janney, Stan, and Gillespie really nailed this tale by going for broke and giving the bittersweet true story a fair dose of punk rock rebellion.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2020

Regardless of your take on the morality of its conceit, the film is so undeniably compelling and well-crafted that it remains a must-see experience. It's not a typical Oscar contender; it's a gritty underdog that might just stick the landing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 29, 2020

A frustrating and often troubling tonal nightmare that skates on thin ice for so long that it's always going to slip up.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 14, 2020

Under all the format gimmicks and stylization, the meta-references and winks at the audience, there is a real heart to this story. When Tonya falls apart at the 1994 Olympics, or breaks down after having skating taken away, her pain is palpable.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2020

I, Tonya is strictly an actor's film in theory, but those onscreen manage to breathe life into what can be a knowingly and unapologetically messy ride.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 23, 2020

Cast & crew
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Competitive ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but her future in the activity is thrown into doubt when her ex-husband intervenes. Competitive ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but her future in the activity is thrown into doubt when her ex-husband intervenes. Competitive ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but her future in the activity is thrown into doubt when her ex-husband intervenes.

Craig Gillespie
Steven Rogers
Margot Robbie
Sebastian Stan
Allison Janney
597 User reviews
448 Critic reviews
77 Metascore
45 wins & 126 nominations total

Top cast 99+

Diane Rawlinson

Martin Maddox

Dody Teachman

Nancy Kerrigan
Tonya (3 1 …

Tonya (8-12 Yrs)

(as Suehyla El-Attar)

Snooty Girl

Skating Judge

Choreographer

Heckling Spectator

Shawn's Mother
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Trivia Allison Janney filmed her Oscar-winning role in just eight days.
Goofs When Tonya Harding competed, song lyrics were not allowed in competition the way they are today. Although she included "Sleeping Bag" by ZZ Top in the third section of her 1991-1992 program, it was the music only.

Tonya Harding : There's no such thing as truth. It's bullshit. Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.

Crazy credits At the beginning of the ending crawl, actual interview footage of Lavona Golden , Shawn Eckardt, Jeff Gillooly, and Tonya Harding is shown that mirrors some of the recreated interviews shown in the film.
Connections Featured in Studio 10: Episode dated 23 October 2017 (2017)
Soundtracks Fair to Love Me Produced, Written & Performed by Mark Batson Courtesy of One Unlimited Media, Inc.

User reviews 597

ryanlaurencecole
Feb 10, 2018
How long is I, Tonya? Powered by Alexa
January 19, 2018 (United States)
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Macon Centreplex, Macon, Georgia, USA (Skating Arena Scenes)
Clubhouse Pictures (II)
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$11,000,000 (estimated)
$30,014,539
Dec 10, 2017
$53,939,297

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‘i, tonya’: film review | tiff 2017.

Margot Robbie breaks through with a strong performance as disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding in Craig Gillespie's darkly comic biopic 'I, Tonya.'

By THR Staff

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Managing to both revel in its subject’s trashiness and convince us she’s far more innocent than America believed, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya reintroduces us to the most infamous athlete-villain of the first half of 1994 (that was the summer of O.J., you’ll recall) and lets her, for once, have the last say. Proving, after many a stolen scene, that she’s capable of carrying a picture in the lead role — even when makeup and hairstylists treat her character’s famous looks cruelly — Margot Robbie takes obvious pleasure in playing figure skater Tonya Harding, from her vulnerable teens to her present-tense, take-it-or-leave-it retirement. The lively and lurid film has solid commercial legs under it and marks a rebound for Gillespie, who has yet to match his lovable breakout film, Lars and the Real Girl , but is definitely earning his right to keep trying.

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I, Tonya Review

"Based on a true story" has been a hook for decades of cinema history, but the storytelling generally requires more than a few asterisks. No big screen feature is ever 100 percent factual -- be it because not enough specific information is available, things need to be spiced up for entertainment value, or a number of other reasons. The majority of titles skirt around this with discussions of "emotional truth" and by getting approval from those involved in the real tale... but Craig Gillespie 's I, Tonya is a unique feature within the way in which it grapples with this conundrum. Openly based on a story full of contradictions (it's noted specifically in the title card), the film fully leans into the various lies and weirdness that rests within the "legend" of professional ice skater Tonya Harding, and constructs a crazy dark, harshly funny narrative that happens to produce some of the best performances of the year.

If you lived through the early 1990s (even as a young kid, as I was), you're very likely aware of the notorious Tonya Harding. Prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics, she found herself caught up in a conspiracy that involved established associates attacking rival Nancy Kerrigan as a means of eliminating her as competition for the games. Screenwriter Steven Rogers' script certainly tells this story, but more importantly rewinds the tape on the life that led up to those events. Anchored by interviews with Tonya ( Margot Robbie ); her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly ( Sebastian Stan ); and her mother, LaVona Fay Golden ( Allison Janney ), I, Tonya explores the titular woman's white trash upbringing in Portland, Oregon, her legitimate aspirations as a figure skater, and all of the horrible abuses that accompany those tales, and provides a whole new fourth-wall-breaking perspective on what is unquestionably one of the strangest scandals in sports history.

A key part of crafting the unique narrative is carving out a specific tone, and as an audience member, I, Tonya is an emotionally complex experience. Tonya (portrayed as a young girl by McKenna Grace ) was left alone with LaVona at a young age, and grew up the subject of constant emotional and physical abuse. That continued into her teens and young adulthood, with Tonya's introduction to Jeff Gillooly, who kept up the pattern going before, during, and even after their marriage. It properly results in many hard to watch scenes in the film that pair with teeth-gritted jaw clenches, and provides a level of sympathy of Tonya that most probably never had. Simultaneously, however, it has no issue throwing out an off-the-cuff line that gets a hearty laugh -- creating quite the razor-thin line for the movie to walk upon. It could have been the film's downfall, as over-the-top, horrific irreverence has no place here, but it's ultimately one of its greatest strengths, as the tone does properly match up with the roller coaster of oddness and oddballs that the reality offers. You will find yourself kind of hating yourself for chuckling, but it is part of the experience and conversation.

On that note, the players in this game are all so weirdly extreme that they make tremendous character fodder for the perfectly cast stars -- and Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan and Allison Janney all make a feast of it. Embracing the hyper-vulgarity and ugliness that comprises LaVona's personality, Janney is the film's truly special presence, as she fiercely pops from the moment she first appears on screen sporting a bowl cut and a ventilator, wearing a fur coat and lively feathered friend on her shoulder. It's an Oscar-worthy showing for sure -- but thankfully doesn't undercut the contributions from the leads, who are also phenomenal in their own right. The glamorous, Australian Robbie utterly disappears as the brash, unapologetic Tonya, truly believing every one of the multiple variations of "It's not my fault;" while Stan as Jeff creates a weirdly adept balance between "mild-mannered" and "scum bag," coming across as quiet and innocent one minute, and revealed as a total asshole the next. With awesome material to dig into, the film sets them up for success, but you still awe at how brilliantly they crush it.

Much like how recent pop culture has shined a bright light on the O.J. Simpson case from the mid-1990s, it was only a matter of time before we saw a take on Tonya Harding and the events surrounding the 1994 Winter Olympics. Thankfully, I, Tonya is the proper exploration of the story. It's a eccentric mix of weird, severe, funny and controversial, but in being so is a proper take on the fractured reality its based upon.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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Margot Robbie is a revelation in I, Tonya : EW review

In a sport of princesses, Tonya Harding was the perpetual toad: a trashy, too-brash outsider whose mind-blowing axels and sheer athleticism could never quite make up for the fact that she didn’t fit the demure, spangled mold of an ideal figure skater. Raised but hardly nurtured by a chain-smoking waitress (Allison Janney, a viper in Tootsie glasses and a mushroom-cap haircut), Tonya steadily clawed her way up the junior ranks, thanks mostly to pure willpower and the proxy parenting of a coach (Julianne Nicholson) who tried her best to steer her wild-card charge. What set Harding’s destiny, though, was the arrival of Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), the dim-bulb paramour and protector whose wonky scheme to take down his wife’s rival Nancy Kerrigan would go down in Olympics infamy.

Director Craig Gillespie ( Lars and the Real Girl ) frames the movie as a faux documentary stuffed with flashbacks, talking heads, and fourth-wall-breaking asides. His form of satire can be a blunt instrument; it’s hard to tell sometimes whether he wants to be the Coen brothers, Christopher Guest, or just Spinal Tap on ice. But he’s also working from a script where the truth was irrefutably stranger than any fiction. And though the physical abuse Harding endures leaves an ugly bruise on its high-camp ’90s nostalgia, there’s something genuinely electric about the narrative’s headlong tumble into madness. The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love. A-

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In I, Tonya , Margot Robbie Reclaims Tonya Harding for the 21st Century

Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly and Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I Tonya

I've had a song stuck in my head for going on twenty five years now. I'll find myself humming it in the shower, whistling it while I go about my day. I try not to sing the words, largely because they go like this:

“Thanks to Lorena Bobbitt, we’ve gained a new way to give men their due/ Act like a chauvinist pig and you get snipped like a Bobbitt in two/ A snip of the cleavers he-ee-ee-ere/ A snip of the cleavers the-ee-ee-ere/ I’m telling you slobs, your thingamabobs are itching for kitchenware!”

I have no idea where I first picked it up (a brief Google search yields no obvious answers) nor why this grisly little jingle stuck with me for so long. I do, of course, remember the 1993 incident to which it refers: in which a Virginia woman named Lorena Bobbitt lopped off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis one night as he slept, threw the severed organ out her car window, then called the police. Earlier that evening, she would allege, he had raped her, part of a long pattern of sexual and physical abuse. Later, the penis would be recovered, reattached, never fully resuscitated. Radio talk-show host Howard Stern , great champion of men and their members, would take up John Wayne’s cause, helping him to raise money for his medical bills. His trial in November 1993 and his wife’s in January 1994 brought hordes of reporters to their town, making this the biggest happening in Manassas, Virginia, since the Civil War, per one Washington Post story.

A jury would acquit John Wayne of marital sexual assault, and another would acquit Lorena of malicious wounding, on the basis of temporary insanity brought on by the abuse she suffered in her marriage. How those two contradictory realities were reconciled, I don’t understand. (I was only 10 years old in 1993.) I do know that the “penile saga,” as The New Yorker editor Tina Brown once referred to it in a letter to Gay Talese , instructing him to beg off the story in favor of “something more rewarding,” became, and remains, a national joke. What was lost in the punch line were the circumstances that might have driven a woman to exact such gruesome revenge, and the broader social realities exposed by Lorena’s extreme example. As Melissa Jeltsen wrote , reassessing the debacle in a piece for the Huffington Post last year, “much of the media portrayed Bobbitt as a crazed, vengeful woman who had perpetrated every man’s worst nightmare. Details of the incident became fodder for late-night comedians. The public made up their own jokes and songs about the sordid circumstances. It didn’t matter that there was overwhelming evidence that John Wayne was abusive, with even the prosecution’s own experts concluding that he had beaten and raped her. (In the years since, John Wayne has been arrested five times and convicted twice for domestic violence offenses involving two different women.)”

This piece is not actually about Lorena Bobbitt, but the manner in which the media and its voracious consumers immediately clocked her as villainess not victim goes some way toward explaining Tonya Harding, the subject of I, Tonya, a new genre-upending biopic from director Craig Gillespie, writer Steven Rogers, and coproducer-star Margot Robbie. Four days before Lorena’s trial began in Virginia, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was exiting an ice rink in Detroit, where she was gearing up for the 1994 national championships—and the Lillehammer Olympics just after—when a man struck her just above the right kneecap with a retractable police baton. He fled, she went down, and suspicion quickly fell on her rival Tonya Harding (who would go on to win gold in Detroit, with Kerrigan sidelined) and the seedy characters with whom Harding associated: her on-again, off-again husband, Jeff Gillooly, and his friend—and her self-styled bodyguard—Shawn Eckardt.

You know the story, or at least you know the narrative that the media was happy to advance: Kerrigan was a graceful swan of a skater, the sport’s anointed princess, with Kennedy-ish good looks, Vera Wang–designed outfits, and the endorsement deals—Campbell Soup, Reebok—to show for it. Harding was the ugly duckling, a rough-around-the-edges tomboy trying to hack it in a girly-girl sport, with bulky thighs, DIY costumes, harsh eye makeup, and crunchy hair that made her look like an extra from a heavy-metal video. She was frequently dinged for her failures of self-presentation by disdainful judges, who gave her the technical marks she deserved only begrudgingly when she forced the issue by landing a triple axel, skating’s most difficult move, never before performed by a U.S. woman in competition. Neither came from money, but they were different kinds of poor: Kerrigan was from Massachusetts, the beloved youngest child of a tight-knit, wholesomely blue-collar family (though that impression would be complicated, decades later, in 2010, when Kerrigan’s brother was convicted of assault and battery in his father’s death). Harding was from the sticks of Clackamas County, Oregon, just south of Portland, with an abusive alcoholic waitress mom, a slew of half siblings, an intermittently employed dad who split when she was a kid, a 10th-grade education (later she would get her GED), and a ne’er-do-well husband whom she’d married at the tender age of 19.

In the prim, uptight, balletic world of figure skating, she stuck out like a sore thumb. Skating was meant to be her ticket out of a hardscrabble childhood, but the powers that be quickly made clear that talent and incredible athleticism did not, especially in the dark ages of the 1980s and ’90s, mean sponsorship dollars or even gold medals. As Frank Rich put it in The New York Times, taking up Harding’s cause against an overwhelming tide of media hate in the aftermath of the Kerrigan incident: “As Tonya Harding, condemned as white-trash lowlife, is tossed unceremoniously into the garbage, it is worth noting that before she surrounded herself with thugs, she played by rules as all-American as Rocky. Imagine, if only for a moment, how she must have felt when late in the game she learned that for her they did not apply.”

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Gillooly and Eckardt, who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, were quickly fingered for planning the vile attack on Kerrigan and hiring the goons who did it, but Harding prepared for Lillehammer with the question of her innocence still very much open (she filed a preemptive lawsuit against the Olympic Committee for the right to compete). She trained for those games dogged by an increasingly aggressive media. The national press had descended on Clackamas County, and reporters hounded her at the local mall (where she famously skated at an ice rink in public view), embedded outside her home, and pulled dirty tricks to force her out in front of their cameras (like getting her truck towed).

Given all that, it is perhaps unsurprising that in Lillehammer, Harding, who had always struggled with consistency, failed to medal or even come close. She had a broken skate, a tearful meltdown in front of the judges, and an awful short program. Kerrigan, who had recovered from her injury, took home the silver, losing the gold to Oksana Baiul, a 16-year-old Ukrainian newcomer. Back home, Gillooly took a plea bargain and testified against his ex-wife, and Harding, to avoid jail time, pled guilty to conspiring to hinder the prosecution. Her punishment included a lifelong ban from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. She never admitted to knowing about the attack before it happened—she still denies that she did—but the court of public opinion was quick to issue its verdict: She was a conniving redneck cheat whose name would forever live in infamy .

It’s never been clear what Harding did or did not know, or what she did or did not do. Was she let off easy (Gillooly, Eckardt, and the two hired hooligans all got jail time), or was she an innocent casualty of the rabid, misogynistic ’90s media run amuck? In 2014, two projects offered different takes on that question. The Price of Gold, an ESPN documentary directed by Nanette Burstein about the Harding-Kerrigan incident, ended with speculation from one of Harding’s childhood acquaintances that she was in on the assault from the outset. That same year, writer Sarah Marshall laid out a persuasive and comprehensive defense of the skater in The Believer, asking us to question why we were so quick to assume Harding’s guilt. “Tonya would claim that the plot had been motivated completely by Jeff’s greed, that she had been aware of it only after the fact, and that she had failed to come forward only because she feared Jeff would kill her if she tried,” Marshall wrote. “Jeff would claim it was Tonya’s idea from the beginning, and that he had merely gone along with her wishes so he could help make her dreams come true. The public, given the opportunity to select one story as the more plausible—and juicier—version, overwhelmingly chose the latter. It seemed there was nothing more enjoyable, in prime time or real life, than a devious plot with a manipulative woman at the top.”

Which brings us to I, Tonya . In the past few years, there has been a concerted effort in our culture to redress the wrongs of less-enlightened decades past, and particularly to reclaim the reputations of some of the women— Marcia Clark , Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill —who were chewed up and spit out by the unfeminist ’90s press. I, Tonya comes into the world at a juncture that’s particularly ripe for it, one in which we, as a country, are suddenly showing a massive, cathartic display of our intention to do better at believing women and at acting on the abuses they report (as Vogue ’s Bridget Read put it, “Belief is not action; belief is not protection or prosecution”). Gillespie’s movie is cleverly structured for its historical moment: It’s a literal he-said-she-said, one that, at least nominally, encourages viewers to draw their own conclusions. Rogers’s script is based on conversations with Harding and Gillooly, now long estranged, whose accounts are, as we read at the film’s outset, “irony free” and “wildly contradictory.” The actors who play them—Robbie and Sebastian Stan—speak their characters’ real words to the camera in talking-head interviews. In between, they act out the action, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to annotate.

The result is a dark (more like pitch-black) comedy that makes you feel uneasy about laughing, a mockumentary that casts doubt on the mechanisms by which documentaries—or journalism more generally—purport to enshrine the truth, a demented, doomed love story that’s mostly about abuse. Much of Gillooly and Harding’s relationship plays against a soundtrack of retro bubblegum pop: sunny, optimistic, lovey-dovey music that is particularly jarring in contrast to the many scenes of physical assault. Because, more than any of those other descriptions I just offered, I, Tonya is a shockingly stark portrait of what chronic, escalating domestic violence might actually look like.

The violence is so foregrounded that when Robbie, about halfway through the film, sourly pronounces, “It’s what you all came for, folks, the fucking incident ,” it actually took me a beat to realize what she was referring to. Any project about Tonya Harding turns on our endless curiosity about her complicity in Kerrigan’s attack. I, Tonya seems to suggest that Harding knew only of a vague scheme to mail Kerrigan a death threat, an ill-advised prank to throw her off her game ahead of a major competition, and didn’t realize that Gillooly and Eckardt had gone beyond that. But the film actually hinges on a different question: How culpable were we in ignoring the violence to which Harding herself was subjected, first by her mother, LaVona Golden (played with brilliant brittleness by Allison Janney), next by her husband (portrayed by Stan as a hot-tempered dope, in over his head in every dimension)? As Sarah Marshall wrote in another piece that touched on the Harding-Kerrigan affair (this one published last year on Splinter ): “In 1994, it was no secret that Tonya Harding had filed multiple restraining orders against her ex-husband, or that she had grown up with a mother who beat her and emotionally abused her, or that her family had refused to press charges after her half brother attempted to rape her when she was 15, or that she said she had taken so long to come forward because she was terrified of what Jeff might do to her. But somehow every part of Tonya Harding’s life could still be passed off not as a story of violence inflicted on a woman, but of violence that a woman had inflicted on the world.”

The film, on its surface, refuses to take sides. Harding’s and Gillooly’s interviews diverge on the question of violence, and each gets a chance to make a case. (Her: “Nancy gets hit one time and the world shits. For me it was an all-the-time occurrence”; him: “I never hit her once. I’m kind of a meek guy. She hit me, though.”) It’s likely enough that there was misbehavior on both sides of the relationship, but it’s Gillooly's abuse of Harding that we see in gory detail. She’s a classically unreliable witness—Robbie plays her as slippery, defensive, bitter (you might be, too?)—but the quantity, the specificity, the weight of her memories makes them impossible to brush off as just one side of a more complicated story.

“I approached this like a documentary in a way,” Gillespie told me when I spoke to him about his film last week. “I actually thought about The Jinx . When you interview subjects in a documentary, they’re giving you their version. As an audience, as human beings, we look at them, and we’re like: Are they lying? Do I believe them? We would talk about that in the performances, as they were doing their interviews: Are you lying right now?”

I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie

The violence is vicious and can be difficult to watch. We see Stan slapping Robbie, popping her in the nose, tackling her, smashing her face into a mirror, into a table. We see Janney throw a knife at Robbie’s arm, and watch as the blood blooms around the buried tip. We see how suddenly tempers spark, how quickly matters get out of hand (notably, though the film doesn’t shy away from physical violence, it barely touches on the sexual violence Harding has attested to in the past). And we see that the police had opportunities to intervene, and that those interventions were never quite good enough “It’s why I don’t trust the authorities,” Harding explains after the cops pull Gillooly over, confiscate two guns and some booze, and say nothing about the blood pouring down the face of the woman sitting on the passenger side (her memory, of course).

“That is something that could have been out there, had it been investigated,” Gillespie told me. “There are police reports . There was a documentary from back when she was 15,” in which Harding describes her mother beating her with a hairbrush (this clip appears in the ESPN film, aired in 1994 on 60 Minutes, and is reenacted in I, Tonya ). “There was that angle, but that wasn’t our culture back then.”

It was one of the first questions Robbie, who was already attached to the project, asked Gillespie when he met with her to pitch himself as director: How would he handle the violence? “I said, I think we have to be brutal,” he remembered. “We can’t shy away from it because this informs so much of who she is, what she lived with, the choices she makes, how she sees the world.” He mentioned one of the first scenes in which we see Gillooly hitting Harding: She addresses the viewer, calmly describing their relationship as he is beating her up: “That, very much emotionally, is where she is. She’s so disconnected from it.”

If I, Tonya has a point—beyond being darkly funny and oddly entertaining and, in some twisted way, an exercise in (now guilt-ridden) nostalgia for those of us who remember the incident—it’s to confront us with, even assault us with, what we treated as a footnote the first time around, or, even worse, used to paint Harding as trashy and underserving of our empathy. It’s to codify on the big screen what feminist writers have been observing for a long time, that the deck was stacked against the skater, and that long before she failed us, we failed her. (Marshall, again: “Seeing Tonya as a victim would have meant seeing that someone should have helped her, and wondering why no one did. It was far easier to see her as a vicious mastermind—and so we did.”) I was struck, in revisiting her story, by just how young she was in early 1994, 23 years old with, as Gillespie put it, “no tools to deal with it, nobody around her to support her, to protect her.” (It’s the same thought I have whenever I think about Monica Lewinsky, who was 22.)

The point is expressly not to relitigate the Kerrigan incident, which Gillespie told me was only the hook for a film that’s actually a character study of Harding and Gillooly. “I think what has enticed us about this story for so long is that there’s this gray area,” the director observed. “We still don’t know the details. That’s what intrigued us about the story, but that’s not the story. My goal was to have this opportunity to take this person in our culture, this villain we’ve known for 25 years, and reexamine her. Not condone what she did, not exonerate her, but just to look at her as a human.”

I, Tonya begins with a hacking cough (another reason to disdain her—she was an athlete with asthma who nonetheless smoked ) and ends with a spurt of blood, as Harding, who did a stint as a boxer after her exile from the ice, gets hit in the face one more time. But for all the visceral intensity of Gillespie’s film, it’s a quiet moment that moved me the most. Robbie as present-day Harding, now in her late 40s, faces the camera and remembers the 1991 national championships, where she took the gold and landed her first triple axel in competition, arguably the peak of her career. “I can’t describe how that felt,” she remembers. “There were people standing up. For the first time, I knew, I knew I was the best figure skater in the world. At one point in time.” Her eyes fill with tears. Her tough girl swagger slips away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Nobody ever asks me about this anymore.”

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I, Tonya Review

16 Feb 2018

In January 1994, Tonya Harding ceased to be famous for figure skating and became infamous following an attack on her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. A media frenzy erupted, continuing throughout that year’s Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, where both women competed, before the disgraced skater was banned from major competition for good. But Craig Gillespie’s nuanced and bleakly funny I, Tonya reminds us, while it’s unclear how much or little she knew about it (she eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder prosecution), Harding did not personally attack her rival, and her reputation as a brawling skate monster is deeply unfair.

We meet Harding as a child (played by Gifted ’s Mckenna Grace), pushed into skating by her overbearing mother LaVona Fay Golden ( Allison Janney ). Golden insists on her daughter’s talent, browbeating local coach Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) into taking her on. But motivating her daughter involves cruel taunts and the neglect of any of Harding’s needs beyond skating — even taking her out of school so she’ll be dependent on her mother’s support. Harding becomes a formidable competitor, but it leaves her isolated, a state of affairs that Golden seems to both cultivate and resent. The relationship we’re shown is physically and emotionally abusive, played out against a background of hard-scrabble poverty that’s a world away from the usual figure-skating ice princesses.

As a teenager, Harding — now Robbie — escapes into the arms of mechanic Jeff Gillooly ( Sebastian Stan ). He’s the epitome of ’80s cool — all anoraks and Freddie Mercury moustache — but their on-off relationship is also abusive, with Harding dodging his fists between practices. Meanwhile, her talent is undeniable, but her star rises slowly, held back by judges more fixated on her dishevelled appearance than on her ability to land a triple axel with double toe loop. The class commentary is clear: if Harding had come from a wealthier background, she wouldn’t have been shunned by the skating community — nor so pilloried for someone else’s actions.

Margot Robbie gives a vanity-free performance under a series of horror wigs.

Robbie impresses as a woman who wasn’t initially given a choice about skating but who absorbed her mother’s resolve to win along the way. It’s a vanity-free performance under a series of horror wigs, capped by a desperate grin more disturbing than the one she wore as Harley Quinn. This Harding is more sinned against than sinning, but was still prone to outbursts of rage and terrible life choices — so she’s no bland heroine.

Yet Robbie’s more than matched by Janney, uncompromising as she claims to have acted out of love. Golden is flamboyant, with her fur coat, a bird on her shoulder and an oxygen line snaking across her face after a lifetime of smoking, but also small, sad and bitter after her predictions of disaster come true. Even by Janney’s standards it’s an unforgettable performance (deservedly awarded a Golden Globe). And Stan, usually relegated to winsomely damaged roles, does an impressive face-heel turn when he morphs from Harding’s saviour into her nemesis.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that the film sometimes gets distracted from getting under Harding’s skin by stylistic flourishes and its fascination with the weird world of her unbelievable life. Gillespie adopts a free-wheeling, unreliable-narrator-led approach framed by contradictory interviews with an older Harding, Golden and Gillooly, mining humour from their disagreements. Add the quick cuts, bright colours and pumping soundtrack, and you can see why this has been compared to GoodFellas . But it’s a consciously less stylised film, shot under ugly fluorescents and in a bleached-out gold that matches Robbie’s frizzy perm. There’s also shakiness in some CG efforts to transpose Robbie’s face onto the skating double.

Still, it’s consistently gripping — a tale that assumes the audience’s complicity in Harding’s trial by media, then forcing us to reconsider. Harding was a victim who refused to act like it, putting up an ultra-tough front for the world. So we made her a villain instead, and never mind the human consequence. Until now, anyway.

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Awards Shows

I, Tonya is the film about a 1994 figure-skating scandal that America needs in 2017

Margot Robbie plays the embattled former Olympian in an unexpectedly resonant docu-comedy.

by Alissa Wilkinson

America has always been fascinated by the scandalous and sordid, and once the 24/7 cable news cycle became firmly entrenched in the mid-1990s, the country was ready to gorge itself.

We got what we asked for. In 1994, when former football star O.J. Simpson was pursued by police down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco, everyone in America tuned in, then stuck around for more than a year to watch his arrest, trial, and eventual acquittal in October 1995. The following year, a child beauty pageant queen named JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in her family’s house, enabling years of tabloid-style speculation about who really did it.

And then there was Tonya Harding, the Olympic figure skater whose connection to a 1994 attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan ensured she’d become as much of a household name — and late-night comedy punchline — as O.J. or JonBenét, or Bill Clinton, for that matter. Just as O.J. somehow distilled America’s racial pathologies and JonBenét encapsulated anxieties about an increasingly sexualized culture , Tonya’s very existence confronted the country’s convenient fictions about being a place where everyone has a fair shot, where an even playing field is the rule.

And the more things change, the more they stay the same. O.J. and JonBenét have both been the subject of (excellent) reconsiderations by documentarians and filmmakers in the past year or so, O.J.: Made in America and Casting JonBenét . From the distance of a couple of decades, their stories seem impossibly prescient of 2017, when the 24/7 news cycle has migrated onto Twitter and Facebook and helped elect a former reality show star with a cable news obsession and a very bad track record on race and gender to the highest office in the land.

Now the triptych is complete. Craig Gillespie’s take on Tonya’s story, the hilarious and gut-punching I, Tonya , is a nearly pitch-perfect black comedy that distills the sensational story into two potent insights very relevant to 2017. It’s a movie about class, and it’s a movie about the nature of truth. And somehow it’s also a supremely entertaining sports movie.

I, Tonya makes a tragicomedy out of an old news event

A working-class girl with an abusive mother and scads of talent, Tonya Harding ( Margot Robbie ) didn’t fit the mold of the well-bred, well-behaved young lady favored by figure skating judges. In the skating world, that’s an automatic handicap: “Presentation” — a refined and expensive costume, carefully groomed hair, demure makeup — is part of the score.

But nobody could deny the girl’s talent from a young age, including her hardened and chain-smoking mother LaVona — who is played, transcendently, by Allison Janney in huge plastic glasses and a shapeless brown mop of hair, equal parts hilarious scenery-gnawing and horrifying cruelty. LaVona shoved Tonya at the age of “a soft 4” to a rink in their hometown of Portland, where she insisted that Diane Rawlinson ( Julianne Nicholson ) coach her daughter.

And it worked. By the time she reached the peak of her skills in the early 1990s, Tonya became the only American woman to land a triple axel, the most difficult triple jump in the sport. I, Tonya skillfully conjures the thrill of that moment both to the audience and, more importantly, to Tonya. For the young skater — used to being smacked around and verbally abused by her mother and by her eventual husband Jeff Gillooly ( Sebastian Stan ) — becoming the best in the world at something was her first moment of validation, not just as a skater but as an actual, valuable human being.

TIFF 2017: Toronto International Film Festival news and movie reviews

The film drives hard on the point that the world both on and off the ice was set against Tonya from the start, specifically because of what she nonchalantly and unapologetically calls her own status as a “redneck.” I, Tonya renders a working-class existence in America without patronization, and Tonya never wants to be like the girls she skates against, but she’s angry that the judges hold it against her. Skating is a sport, not a beauty pageant; why should her homemade costumes and permed hair count against her?

But the whole world is against Tonya, and the way the “incident” with Nancy Kerrigan unfolds — as well as the media feeding frenzy around it — is a testament to the frustration of that struggle.

I, Tonya spares no words on America’s addiction to scandal

In pushing the film into gonzo-style comedy instead of melodrama or pure docudrama, Gillespie successfully navigates a very tricky line — this is, after all, a story filled with domestic abuse and violence, something that shouldn’t be played for laughs but is also not the focus of the story.

Gillespie’s camera moves briskly and vigorously in scenes at the rink and at home, which gives I, Tonya a kinetic energy that doesn’t dwell too long on anything. The dramatic beats come and go quickly, with gasps and laughs piling on top of each other at the speed of a spinning skater. With a big, fun soundtrack filled with rock hits from the 1980s and ’90s, it feels at times like a music video.

The structure of the film helps too. I, Tonya is set up to mimic a documentary; the story unfolds in “interviews” reminiscent of those in a Christopher Guest movie. In those interviews, Tonya, LaVona, Diane, Jeff, and other characters tell the story their way; text at the beginning of the film explains that it’s “based on irony-free, totally contradictory” interviews with Tonya and Jeff. That the characters’ interviews control the tone and speed of the story — that they’re allowed to talk about what seems significant to them — gives the story a jolt of realism, even though the conceit is obviously artificial.

The fact that the stories contradict one another allows the movie to do a few other things that put it in the same category as a movie like The Big Short : It breaks the fourth wall, gives multiple perspectives on the same events, and occasionally employs a split screen in order to emphasize how mushy the concept of “facts” are in any sensational news story. What we have is one person’s word against another — and as soon as it’s televised, everyone who watches develops their own theory of what really happened. It’s no surprise we’re now in a “post-truth” era.

With unblinking candor, Robbie’s Tonya says that her story became so big because the 24/7 news cycle needed something to fill it. “America, you know, they want someone to love, and they want someone to hate, and they want it easy,” she says. She was an easy villain for America, easy to hate in contrast to well-behaved ice princess Nancy Kerrigan. This was also a theme visited by both The People v. O.J. Simpson and Casting JonBenét , and it’s at the crux of what makes these stories so compulsively interesting right now. The “real” events get refracted endlessly through millions of breathless watchers’ experiences and start to take on meanings that have only a tenuous connection to the truth, whatever that may be.

Tonya Harding’s story is one of resilience, and the movie tells us that — partly by letting her (or Robbie playing a version of her) speak, and partly by keeping Kerrigan out of it entirely, save for a few shots. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a tragedy. “There’s no such thing as truth,” Tonya says near the end of the film. “It’s bullshit. Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.”

America’s relationship to its own news is less of a search for information and more like an unhealthy sort of fandom, consumed with theories and scandals and villains. Tonya Harding was both lucky and unlucky enough to have triple-axeled her way into that spotlight.

I, Tonya premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by Neon. It opens in limited release on December 8 and wide in January 2018.

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Den of Geek

I, Tonya Review

I, Tonya balances with on a razor's edge comedy and tragedy while always landing on the jugular.

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For most Americans of a certain age, Tonya Harding remains an unforgettable figure. The ice princess with the apparent mouth of a sailor; the bad competitor who tried to scalp Nancy Kerrigan’s career with the dumbest criminal conspiracy this side of a Home Alone movie; pure ‘90s kitsch. In her time, she was pop culture furniture, every bit as derided as a certain white Ford Bronco and a blue dress. Yet all that baggage simply makes I, Tonya that much more delicious, not least of all because the collective memory of Harding would seem to be wrong, as per the film.

Skating a line as thin as any triple-axel landing, I, Tonya mischievously balances itself at the odd angle between gallows humored satire and a pointed tragedy that is just as quick to indict its audience’s appetite for blood as it is to blame Harding for surrounding herself with buffoons. Both a black comedy and a lamentation over the personal and communal signals that doomed Tonya to punchline-status, even I, Tonya ’s title underscores the dueling elements of its premise: here is an athlete whose self-aggrandizement would place her trials on the same footing as ancient Roman epics like I, Claudius —and yet it’s still as bitterly sad as any other opera about a swift rise and crashing fall.

Taking more than a few pages from Martin Scorsese’s narrative playbook about smalltime (read: stupid) criminals, I, Tonya embraces the ambiguity surrounding an infamous celebrity by conveying its story from the perspective of multiple, and frequently contradictory, narrators. Primarily the wistful recollections of a now middle-aged Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) and Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), the movie wallows in depicting its film as a he-said, she-said. Throughout the picture, the now very divorced couple will alternate in narrating scenes, with one occasionally breaking the fourth wall in the other’s version of events by dismissing them while staring dead into the camera. (But given events of the last year, Jeff’s insistences on never physically beating Tonya are going to fall on entirely deaf ears).

Indeed, Robbie’s Tonya is a collection of contemptuous mini-rebellions. Growing up in a poor, white rural setting, she’d never fit in with the actual ice princesses she skates against, and thus chooses to never try. She wears costumes which she designs herself and skates to ZZ Top as opposed to Bach. This Tonya enjoyed provoking disdainful judges long before Nancy Kerrigan’s knee was bent the wrong way, and she continues to do so in the present interludes where Robbie under makeup flicks her cigarettes in her modest kitchen with the obvious desire to throw ash in the audiences’ eyes.

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This confrontational affectation though is apparently born out of a lifetime of being confronted by violence, first in the psychological and physical abuse by her mother LaVona (a wickedly brilliant Allison Janney), then the teenage husband she escaped with in Jeff, and finally in the bloodthirstiness of a media and elite class that savored the schadenfreude of chewing up and throwing away the white trash where it belongs: in the backwoods gutter that she dared to escape from.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle there, Tonya briefly becomes the number one skater in America… and then gets embroiled in an extraordinary idiot’s plan to literally kneecap her Olympic competition. It’s also when this dimwitted friend of Jeff’s (Paul Walter Hauser) starts discussing his espionage training that the movie’s fangs really come out.

As a biopic that enjoys putting its finger in the eye of standard true story dramatizations, I, Tonya lives and dies by its performances, which score high across the board. Margot Robbie has been one of the rising stars of the decade, but truly breaks through as a major talent with this indie she also produced. Once again enjoying the indulgence of wearing a unique American dialect after her heavy Queens intonations in The Wolf of Wall Street , the Australian actress devours a Northwestern tongue so thick that it’s a marvel she doesn’t choke.

While bearing little resemblance to the real Tonya Harding, Robbie commands the role by tackling much of the physicality on the ice wherever possible, and Tonya’s foulmouthed aggression everywhere else. Also by never losing touch of the vulnerability and surprisingly resonant humanity beneath the fiery figure skater, Robbie is able to keep the humor of the ridiculousness of Harding’s story ever visible without losing its melancholy.

The others do strong work too, with Hauser playing moronic comic relief to a tee, but the one who steals the movie is Janney as Tonya’s awful mother. Personifying every gruesome stereotype of stage mothers—her lofty goal is to browbeat her three-year-old into an Ice Capades performer—Janney is unrelenting and unapologetic about playing a devastating force of ugly human nature. Whether dropping c-bombs at children or throwing a steak knife at her daughter, Janney never winces at cutting into the role with a surgeon’s precision. It’s so good that I’ll eat my skates if she isn’t a nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

This all plays well into director Craig Gillespie’s sardonic vision. Easily the helmer’s best movie since Lars and the Real Girl 10 years ago, Gillespie returns to his knack for finding sweetness in potentially uneasy premises, be it via romancing blow-up dolls or telling sympathetic accounts of Tonya Harding’s life. And he really does succeed in the latter by not shying away from the absurdity of Tonya—even if apparently unwittingly in the movie’s account—allowing her “bodyguard” to send men after her rival’s knee.

With a frisky pace and editing style evocative of Scorsese, the biopic has a brisk freshness that avoids too much sentimentality; it also does an impressive job of turning the camera into a ghostly skating partner with Robbie during the movies several kinetic moments on the ice. If it falls short anywhere, it is perhaps being too glossy as it glides toward the final stretch of its routine. With a soundtrack almost solely comprised of contemporary pop tunes, also like Goodfellas , there is a smoothness to its arc that ultimately skates around the darkest implications of its third act, which sees class warfare skid into the realm of human sacrifice.

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Nevertheless, I, Tonya is a biting triumph that aims to kick more than just the air before its performance is finished. The movie challenges the media’s vindictiveness, the 24-hour news cycle of sensationalism, and even gawking moviegoers of being as complicit as the trashy folks who ensnared Tonya, beginning at birth, into a lifelong trajectory that was always headed downward. It’s so brutally aware of the buttons it’s pushing that it knows exactly where that razor-sharp wit finally lands: in the audience’s jugular.

I, Tonya opens on Friday, Dec. 8.

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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Comedy , Drama

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In Theaters

January 5, 2018
Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding; Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly; Allison Janney as LaVona Golden; Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt; Julianne Nicholson as Diane Rawlinson

Home Release Date

March 13, 2018
Craig Gillespie

Distributor

Movie Review

Ever since Sonja Henie floated across a sheet of Olympic ice in St. Mortiz in 1928, competitive women’s figure skating has been as much art as sport. Forget the jumps, the spins, the countless hours of dedication. A champion needs to make it all look effortless—to glide across the ice like a vision. A skater must be a ballerina, a princess, an angel , her outfit shimmering in silk and sequins, her face tranquil and beautiful, her every gesture embraced by grace.

Then again, Tonya Harding was a champion—for a minute or two, anyway. And she ain’t any of that.

Tonya’s a rhino in a field of unicorns, Rosie the Riveter in a party of princesses. Some called her the Charles Barkley of figure skating—muscular, bold, competitive and crass. In a world of prim debutants who stick out their pinkies when they sip tea, Tonya takes a beer from the fridge and drinks straight from the bottle.

LaVona, Tonya’s mother, saw her little girl’s love for skating early on and taught her it was a blood sport. When Tonya chats with another skater on the ice, LaVona puts a stop to it. “That girl’s your enemy!” she shouts. When Tonya wets herself because her mother won’t let her take a bathroom break, LaVona has no remorse. “Skate wet,” she instructs.

Tonya’s coach, Dianne Rawlinson, suggests to LaVona that perhaps she should think about not only how Tonya’s fitting in with the other skaters, but how she’s growing up—and what she’s learning from her driving, raging, profanity-spewing mother. Her mother’s having none of that. Tonya may not fit in, but she can do a triple.

Yes indeed, she can. Tonya may not be a vision of grace on the ice, but she can leap with the best of ’em, and can land that infamous triple axel—a soaring jump where you need to rotate three-and-a-half times—that no other woman in the world can do. Sure, the other girls can skate around like Disney princesses and look beautiful in the moonlight, but Tonya can jump over the moon and then some. That should be worth something, right?

And it is. Sometimes. In 1991, Tonya is crowned the U.S. Women’s Figure Skating Champion. “I was loved,” she later says. “For the first time, I knew—I knew —I was the best figure skater in the world. At one point in time.”

By then, she’s no longer with her abusive mother, LaVona. She’s married her first real beau, Jeff Gillooly. So what if he might also be a little abusive? That’s just how people in Tonya’s circle show their love, right?

But Tonya’s abrasive attitude still rubs skating officials raw. Her sometimes casual approach to training nibbles away at her in-rink skills. She finishes fourth in the 1992 Olympics, right behind the graceful Nancy Kerrigan. She slips to sixth in the world in 1993. And when qualifying for the 1994 Olympics begins in earnest, there’s serious danger that she might not make the Olympic team at all.

Still, that’d be no reason to try to eliminate one of her U.S. rivals, would it? Nope. No sir. No way, no how.

“Nancy and I were friends,” she later says of Nancy Kerrigan. “What kind of friggin’ person would bash in a friend’s knee?”

Positive Elements

I, Tonya pays homage in its title to I, Claudius , a much-praised novel by Robert Graves. In the book, Claudius (a real, historical figure) is a stooped, stammering, ill-regarded royal who for years is kept out of the spotlight because he doesn’t look or sound like a Roman emperor should. But when he finally claims the throne (after pretty much everyone else in succession is dead), he proves to be one of the empire’s most able leaders.

This movie suggests that there’s something of Claudius in Tonya. She, too, was not considered suitable to be a champion. But even though she dealt with innumerable and arguably unfair challenges—from skating’s elitist culture to the brutal behavior of her own mother—Tonya managed to succeed through dedication, talent and sheer force of will. And while we may not like her or approve of her behavior, we can at least respect her tenacity.

Like Claudius, Tonya was surrounded by plenty of off-ice drama. Many of us probably know what happened in the real Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan rivalry: How Nancy Kerrigan did indeed get her knee bashed and how folks in Tonya’s circle, if not Tonya herself, were involved in perhaps the most bungling caper in Olympic history. But this movie is told primarily from Tonya’s point of view; and she had no idea that Shawn Eckhardt was going to hire a couple of dumb thugs to wreck Nancy’s career. Sure, Tonya may be guilty of trying to intimidate Nancy through a little ol’ death threat. But plotting to have her knee thwacked? Of this, Tonya is completely innocent.

Tonya’s not completely without positive role models, though. Her coach, Dianne, does her best to steer her headstrong charge in a better, healthier direction. And when it looks as though Tonya’s career is over, Dianne is the lone person in her corner who still believes she’s got what it takes to make it to the Olympics again. “The world has given you a second chance,” she tells Tonya. “I know you don’t believe in them, but I do.”

Spiritual Elements

Diane talks about the possibility of miraculous second chances.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Tonya says that Jeff Gillooly was the first person she ever dated. Tonya’s mother comes along on their first date, asking vulgarly if they’ve had sex yet. They hadn’t at that point, but it was only a matter of time. They wind up living together before they tie the knot, and we see them make out frantically, as well as tumbling onto beds and floors to have sex. (We see some explicit movements as well as perhaps just a bit of Jeff’s exposed backside.) They kiss frequently. Eventually, Tonya divorces Jeff, but they continue to work closely together.

We don’t see any explicit nudity between Tonya and Jeff, but a scene does take place in a strip club, and we see topless dancers wearing tassels working in the background. When Tonya is a teen, we see her in a bra. Her brother grabs her (clothed) breast at one point. Tonya skates to ZZ Top’s suggestive song “Sleeping Bag.” Skaters, naturally, wear form-fitting outfits for competition. We learn that LaVona now lives behind a porn shop.

Violent Content

The attack on Nancy’s knee is pretty brief and bloodless. We see a guy whip out the baton and land the blow. While trying to get away, the assailant finds the door to the outside is locked and, in desperation, breaks the door’s glass with his head. He knocks over a guy as he flees.

And then there’s the abuse that LaVona, Jeff and Tonya inflict upon each other. When Tonya is just a little girl, LaVona beats her with a brush. She kicks over a chair Tonya’s sitting in. When Tonya’s older, the two fight, and one winds up stabbing the other in the arm with a knife. (We see blood on both the arm and the table.) LaVona pays someone to heckle her, too. “The thing about Tonya, she would skate better when she was enraged,” her mom says by way of excuse.

When Tonya moves in with Jeff, she suggests that she exchanged one abusive relationship for another. We see Jeff slap and punch Tonya in the face and slam her against walls. She later gets a restraining order against him. Her face is sometimes bloody and bruised. Tonya slaps Jeff, too, and at one point tells him that he should just kill himself.

She also shoots at him with a shotgun. “I never did this,” Tonya says as she ejects a casing from the weapon. Indeed, the movie suggests that neither Tonya nor Jeff are necessarily reliable narrators: Jeff characterizes himself as a “pretty meek guy” who’d never hurt anyone. Meanwhile, Tonya is, in her mind, always the victim. The film simply documents the chaos from each of their points of view.

As a child, Tonya and her father shoot and skin rabbits (we don’t see the bullet hit, but we do see a carcass dressed), and her father makes her a fur coat out of the pelts. Tonya throws skates at her coach. She pushes past other skaters. After her skating career is over, Tonya takes up boxing: We see her getting beaten savagely and knocked down, spitting blood out on the ring floor before getting back up again.

Crude or Profane Language

About 130 f-words, 25 s-words and three uses of the c-word. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—,” along with seven misuses of God’s name (three with “d–n”) and five abuses of Jesus’ name. We also see a couple of crass hand gestures. There’s a crude verbal reference to the male anatomy. A guy from a television tabloid opines that the two people who actually perpetrated the attack on Nancy were the “two biggest boobs in a story populated solely by boobs.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Tonya and most of the folks in her circle smoke cigarettes. We see her at one point stop smoking right before going on the ice and snuffing the butt out with her skate blade. She drinks beer, too; a few scenes take place in bars. In a flashback, we see Tonya and Nancy in a hotel room together, shotgunning beers. Jeff’s car is pulled over when he’s drunk and the car contains alcohol (and a couple of guns besides.)

Other Noteworthy Elements

Tonya knows that Jeff and Shawn are plotting to throw off Nancy’s game somehow, but she believes that they’re “just” going to send a couple of threatening letters. (In fact, she got the inspiration when she received a death threat of her own and assumed someone from a rival skating camp sent it to her.) It’s later suggested that Shawn masterminded the attack himself to drum up more business. “I’m Tonya’s bodyguard,” he says. “Now maybe more athletes are going to need a bodyguard.”

A very young Tonya wets herself. Feigning a tender reunion, LaVona carries a tape recorder into Tonya’s house and tries to sneak a confession out of her.

“Tonya, tell the truth!” an unchastened Tonya Harding says several years after the Nancy Kerrigan incident, mimicking her inquisitors. “There’s no such thing as truth. Everyone has their own truth.”

It’s a pretty cynical statement, uttered by a woman who’s never been given a reason to be anything but. She was taught from the cradle to look out for No. 1, ’cause sure as shootin’ no one else was going to.

There’s a lesson in here for us, I think—a reminder of how much kids need an encouraging word or two growing up, and a reminder of what can happen when they don’t get it. This movie doesn’t ask us to like Tonya Harding. But it does ask us to understand her a little better. I, Tonya is presented as a dark comedy, and yes, it can be funny. But it’s a tragedy, too. Sometimes we see that tragedy written on Tonya’s face (played exquisitely by Margot Robbie), and we’re left to wonder what could’ve been.

The content here is its own concentrated tragedy, of course. Nary a kind word is heard in I, Tonya , but plenty of profane ones are. Those who wish to weather this tru-ish story will need to weather gales of f-words, many of them uttered by the movie’s deeply flawed protagonist.

I, Tonya is, in a way, an anti-redemption story, about a would-be superstar who grew up in a prodigal house and a judgmental industry, and somehow succeeded in spite of all that. Then she sabotaged her own career (with plenty of help). And then, miracle of miracles, she was given a second chance.

I know you don’t believe in them, her coach told her. But I do.

But the company you keep matters. The decisions you make matter. Tonya Harding’s story could’ve been one for the ages, a Rocky redux made real. Instead, it’s a farce. “I was loved for a minute,” she laments. “Then I was hated. Then … I was just a punchline.”

Tonya Harding says there’s no such thing as truth. But her own words reveal the lie in that statement. Truth is she was loved, and hated, and became a punchline. Truth is that I, Tonya , gives us reasons for all three responses, but in such a way that it blisters the ears, makes you giggle and somehow, still saddens your soul.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Eden review: i loved to hate ana de armas in ron howard's completely unhinged thriller [tiff], james mcavoy recalls replacing joaquin phoenix on split: “ditched it 2 weeks before they started”, i, tonya is a wild and entertaining exploration of one of sport's most controversial figures, spearheaded by excellent performances from the cast..

I, Tonya is the latest film from director Craig Gillespie ( Lars and the Real Girl, Fright Night ) and is based on the life of former U.S. figure skater Tonya Harding. She is best known for her connection to a 1994 attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan, which aimed to injure Kerrigan's leg so Harding could move up the national rankings. This biopic looks to shed light on the full picture surrounding this infamous event, including Harding's tough upbringing and all of the fallout after "The Incident." Gillespie's film has earned a fair amount of awards buzz as it toured the festival circuit in 2017, and it's certainly deserving of the praise it's getting. I, Tonya is a wild and entertaining exploration of one of sport's most controversial figures, spearheaded by excellent performances from the cast.

As a young girl, Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) is forced into the realm of skating by her abusive and rough mother LaVona (Allison Janney). Being pulled out of school to dedicate herself to athletics full-time, Tonya quickly becomes one of the best figure skaters in the world, but struggles appealing to the judges because of her appearance and attitude. While Tonya tries to ascend the ranks, she falls in love with Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and the two later marry so Tonya can finally gain independence from LaVona's watch, but things aren't always happy for the pair.

Harding works her way to compete in the 1992 Olympics, but settles for a disappointing fourth-place finish while her friend Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) takes home the bronze medal. Thinking her career is over, Tonya receives a second lease on skating when the next Winter Olympics are planned for 1994. As she trains for what could be her final shot, those around Tonya plot a way to give her an advantage over the competition - one that could lead to devastating consequences if carried out.

I, Tonya 's tone and style are among its strongest attributes, with Gillespie nailing the execution of a dark comedy. This approach proves to be the best for this particular story, considering all its absurdities. Due to a high-energy pace (with several scenes set to a catchy soundtrack) and a humorous tale of average people getting in over their heads with the law, I, Tonya plays as an amusing blend of Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers, keeping the audience engaged throughout its brisk 2-hour runtime. Gillespie also makes great use of mockumentary interviews and fourth-wall breaking to give it an extra dose of panache. While the filmmaker doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel with his handling of the material, it's still very effective and a welcome alternative to a more straightforward biopic.

Gillespie's direction is complemented nicely by Steven Rogers' screenplay, which populates its world with a colorful cast of characters that all stand out. Of course, Robbie's Tonya is the star of the show, and the part feels like it was tailor-made for the actress. This is the best Robbie has been since her breakout turn in The Wolf of Wall Street , unleashing an unfiltered and raw performance that always demands the viewer's attention. She fully inhabits Harding's self-proclaimed redneck persona, showcasing a variety of layers to give the character depth. Some may take issue with the film's portrayal of Harding (a widely hated villain) as a victim of circumstance, but she's certainly an intriguing individual to watch and the film never sugarcoats the less-than-savory aspects of her life. Rogers is able to deftly balance the comedy and drama, with Robbie anchoring the film.

Not to be outdone is Janney, who has long been a favorite in several Best Supporting Actress races. She's definitely earned that status, with a committed performance that's bluntly hilarious in its vulgarity. Audiences are not meant to like LaVona, and Janney makes sure she's someone moviegoers will love to hate. Her dynamic with Robbie is a key aspect early on in the film (the script funnily points out when LaVona's "storyline" has been dropped), with the two playing off each other in captivating fashion to display a dysfunctional and toxic relationship. This is no tale of motherly love - only LaVona's twisted perception of the concept. She believes she's doing what's best for her daughter, but Tonya deserves better.

Sebastian Stan and Margot Robbie in I Tonya

With regards to the rest of the supporting cast, Paul Walter Hauer is a scene-stealer as Shawn, Jeff's friend who tries to wage "psychological warfare" against Kerrigan. He joins the pantheon of all-time movie imbeciles with warped delusions of grandeur and is responsible for several of the film's biggest laughs (see: his constant claims he works in espionage). Stan also excels as Gillooly, getting an opportunity to stretch his acting wings with a performance that asks him to demonstrate a variety of traits to convincing effect. There are moments of sweetness between him and Robbie that show what Jeff and Tonya's romance could have been before things swing in the opposite direction, and both actors handle their scenes with skill. Julianne Nicholson is also a nice presence as Tonya's skating coach Diane Rawlinson, providing the point of view of a "regular" person caught up in this madness.

In a crowded field of 2018 awards contenders, I, Tonya is one that stands out and is worth a cinephile's time at the theater as it expands to more markets. The real-life Harding's reputation precedes her in the court of public opinion, which could be a sticking point for certain audience members, but for those willing, the movie is a treat. Robbie and Janney are at the top of their games and Gillespie found a way to tell the strange story in a way that combines style with substance. The film isn't a Best Picture frontrunner, but is a player in other major categories, making it one that's difficult to miss for those trying to keep up.

I, Tonya is now playing in U.S. theaters. It runs 120 minutes and is rated R for pervasive language, violence, and some sexual content/nudity.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments!

Based on the life of figure skater Tonya Harding, I, Tonya chronicles Harding's personal life, rise to fame, and subsequent downfall after her involvement in the infamous attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. Framed in a mockumentary style that routinely breaks the fourth wall, I, Tonya is directed by Craig Gillespie and stars Margot Robbie and Harding, with Sebastian Stan and Allison Janney as Harding's ex-husband and overbearing mother respectively.

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“I, Tonya,” Reviewed: A Condescending Bio-pic of Tonya Harding

Hollywood has two main ways of depicting working-class characters: as sullen, silent strugglers, or as loud, laughable vulgarians. Craig Gillespie’s “I, Tonya,” which opens tomorrow, takes mainly the second path, and that approach, that failure to find an original and personal tone, undercuts and counteracts the movie’s main merit—its empathetic depiction of Tonya Harding, the Olympic figure skater who, in 1994, was involved in a plot to harm her main rival, Nancy Kerrigan.

The filmmakers are upfront—in title cards—about basing the film on interviews with the real-life Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, and about the differing points of view on the events that the drama will present. The film begins, ends, and is punctuated by faux interviews with the main characters, who discuss their conflicting accounts of what happened or might have happened and their divergent points of view about those events. Gillespie in effect films the entire action as hypotheticals, in a cinematic conditional mood that’s emphasized throughout the film both by the interpolated staged interviews and by characters’ asides to the camera, addressing the viewer with winking interpretations of the actions in progress.

The drama starts in Tonya’s childhood, in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-nineteen-seventies. She’s being raised by her single mother, LaVona (Allison Janney), a fast-talking, smart, lifeworn, and embittered waitress, who brings Tonya, who is not quite four years old and has already displayed talent and passion for skating, to the local rink for rigorous training, in the hope that she might eventually make the Ice Capades. But LaVona’s idea of tough love appears to be tougher than it is loving. In Gillespie’s telling, Tonya (played as an adult by Margot Robbie, who also co-produced the film) was abused by LaVona both as a child and as an adult. But the film shows LaVona beating Tonya with a hairbrush (only once, LaVona chimes in), slapping and pummelling her, verbally berating her (LaVona claims that Tonya skates better angry), preventing the child from leaving the ice to pee. Then, during a fight with the teen-age Tonya, LaVona is depicted as throwing first a glass at her and then a knife, which pierces her arm.

Meanwhile, Tonya wins prizes in figure-skating competitions and rises through the ranks of the field. The unpampered, rugged, rustic Tonya also chops wood, fixes cars, and holds tough manual-labor jobs. Her athletic ascension is presented (to the extent that it’s presented at all) as a sort of tunnel-vision monomania, the work of a furious virtuosa whose physical strength, athleticism, and skill have no balance in education or experience. (She quit high school in order to devote herself to skating.) She competes under her mother’s iron grip and before her iron gaze, and endures her mother’s fiercely partisan, loud, raucous, and uninhibitedly crude advocacy on her behalf from the stands. LaVona is depicted as becoming both a terror and an embarrassment, and Tonya, while still a teen-ager, makes her break, leaving—as the movie tells it—the frying pan for the fire.

At fifteen, at her local rink, she meets Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), who was about eighteen and was there with his best friend, Shawn Eckardt (Paul Walter Hauser). She begins to date Jeff, and Jeff, too, is depicted in the film as physically abusive: he beats her, repeatedly; he mashes her head against a wall; she takes out a restraining order against him. At the age of eighteen, she marries Jeff, then leaves him, then reconciles with him; he slams a car door on her hand (in the film, Jeff denies doing this); he threatens her, and then himself, with a gun—and then shoots her, resulting in a flesh wound to her face.

Gillespie’s flashy camera moves on and off the ice, his slick and rapid editing tricks, and his intercutting of interviews and asides don’t provide perspective but rather amusement, even diversion, distracting from what’s actually a crucial and anguished subject of the movie, the abuse that Tonya endures. But Gillespie plays it for comedy; what he approaches with some measure of earnestness is the aftermath—Tonya’s effort to conceal a facial bruise before a competition, her complicity with Jeff in helping him avoid arrest for shooting her.

While becoming a skating star, the first American woman (the movie dwells on this point) to complete a triple axel, Tonya endures yet another form of abuse, not physical but systemic: the American ice-skating establishment, in the person of the judges it employs to score competitions, discriminates against Tonya on the basis of her background and her manners, to reinforce the sport’s genteel and, as one judge says, “wholesome” self-image.

Yet the movie perpetuates the very condescension that it purports to condemn: it treats Tonya’s background, her tastes, her habits, her way of talking, as a joke. It may think it’s laughing with her, but Tonya’s not laughing. For that matter, Tonya’s not doing much of anything except skating. Halfway through the film, after she delivers unsatisfying results at the 1992 Winter Olympics, in Albertville, France (Tonya blames a broken skate, but the movie, in a rapid, almost flash-frame montage, suggests that she has been partying too hard, eating and drinking too much, gaining weight, and getting out of shape), and is preparing for a comeback (at twenty-three) in the 1994 Olympics, in Lillehammer, Norway, the infamous story gets under way, the one that has made the real-life Harding notorious.

“I, Tonya” goes into intricate detail regarding the attack on Harding’s principal rival, Nancy Kerrigan, who was struck on the knee with a metal rod just before matching up against Harding in a competition in Detroit prior to the Olympics. The movie shows the nature of Tonya’s involvement—and noninvolvement. I won’t spoil the twist, but here, too, she is revealed to be the victim of self-serving people close to her. The walls of law enforcement close in on Tonya, and her bewilderment at the devastating and irreparable consequences of her bad associations offers a touch of pathos that most of the movie, depicting horrors, deflects.

Yet the movie shies away from Tonya’s actual identity, temperament, culture, activities, and tastes. Her work as a fork-lift operator and a welder is a tossed-off line of dialogue; her interests are undefined; her ostensible lack of refinement is merely a matter of her loud voice and salty vocabulary; her relationships are utterly vague, as is her wider network of interactions, of friends and relatives and colleagues and rivals. Gillespie never sees Tonya as a person but as a character in a drama, reduced to her function in her own story. The movie delivers more of the culture and mental life of the secondary character of Shawn, the delusional braggart who serves as Tonya’s bodyguard and claims to be an internationally acclaimed counterterrorism expert. Gillespie stages his empathy for Tonya at arm’s length; he fails to respond to her experience in a direct, personal way. The result is a film that’s as derisive and dismissive toward Tonya Harding as it shows the world at large to have been.

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 9 Reviews
Kids Say 25 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Fact-based dark comedy has strong language, domestic abuse.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Disturbing domestic violence (hitting/beating) that's depicted realistically, wi

Pervasive strong language includes frequent uses of "f--k," "s--t," plus "c--t,"

Non-graphic sex scenes between a couple both before and after they get married.

A fair amount of smoking by a world-class athlete. Also some drinking and drug u

Any Positive Content?

You could spin the film's message into something about Harding (according to the

Harding is undoubtedly a survivor. But pretty much every relationship she has in

Violence & Scariness

Disturbing domestic violence (hitting/beating) that's depicted realistically, with emotional impact. There are several such incidents; Harding is abused by both her mother and, later, her boyfriend/husband. The infamous attack on Nancy Kerrigan is shown in passing. The most graphic violence occurs in boxing matches toward the end, which are pretty vicious and bloody. Young Tonya and her father go hunting; a rabbit is killed and skinned.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Pervasive strong language includes frequent uses of "f--k," "s--t," plus "c--t," "d--k," "ass," "damn," "crap," "hell," "goddamn," and more.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Non-graphic sex scenes between a couple both before and after they get married. Strip-club nudity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A fair amount of smoking by a world-class athlete. Also some drinking and drug use, sometimes by elite athletes (some take bong hits in a hotel room).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

You could spin the film's message into something about Harding (according to the film) being a survivor. But, really, it plays out as a series of calamities perpetrated by morons who ruin a person's life.

Positive Role Models

Harding is undoubtedly a survivor. But pretty much every relationship she has in the film is toxic, except for one of her coaches, who tries to help her. None of the other key characters are particularly admirable, either, especially Harding's mother.

Parents need to know that I, Tonya is based on the true story of controversial 1990s figure skater Tonya Harding ( Margot Robbie ). It's a dark comedy with plenty of mature content. Harding is serially abused by both her mother and her boyfriend/husband; the scenes of abuse are depicted realistically and have intense emotional impact. There's also pervasive strong language ("f--k," "s--t," and more), some sexuality (including strip-club nudity), and both drug use and smoking, sometimes by world-class athletes. Plus, the movie presents a pretty bleak view of the world, in which a person can have everything she's worked for destroyed by idiots and sociopaths. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (9)
Kids say (25)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Wow I was surprised!

It’s different, what's the story.

In I, TONYA, scrappy Tonya Harding ( Margot Robbie ) overcomes class divisions to become a world-class figure skater. Despite a fraught relationship with her (depicted as) abusive mother, LaVona ( Allison Janney ), and an explosive one with her (depicted as) abusive boyfriend/husband, Jeff Gillooly ( Sebastian Stan ), Harding rises to compete at the highest levels. But on the cusp of the 1994 Winter Olympics, an attack on her chief rival, Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver), threatens to undo everything Harding has worked for.

Is It Any Good?

This blackly comic chronicle of an event we all thought we knew about will be remembered long after the end credits roll. The real-life Harding has given I, Tonya her seal of approval, so it's not surprising that the movie is sympathetic to her, but it's a feat to pull it off with such aplomb. Robbie 's portrayal gets under the skin of a person shaped by abandonment, abuse, and class warfare. Her Tonya is a fighter, a survivor. Despite codependent relationships with her abusers and some pretty poor decisions, the lower-working-class girl makes herself into a force in the hoity-toity figure skating world (at least, as it's depicted in the film). And all this is accomplished on-screen with humor and spirit. Director Craig Gillespie ( The Finest Hours , Million Dollar Arm ) and writer Steven Rogers ( P.S. I Love You , Hope Floats ) have never demonstrated anything like this in their filmographies -- the closest would be Gillespie's offbeat Lars and the Real Girl . But I, Tonya is snappy, biting, and dark. It's hilarious in its depictions of the morons plotting the infamous attack on Kerrigan and painful in showing the incident's impact on Harding.

The film shows a completely different side of Harding than you get from news coverage, but ultimately, it's all about truth and perspective. I, Tonya challenges what you believe. Toward that end, it offers multiple points of view of events, including intentionally conflicting ones. Stan must play Gillooly as an abusive jerk, a well-meaning supporter, and a dimwitted criminal "mastermind," all at the same time. Janney transforms as Harding's toxic mother, whose actions can seem over-the-top but remain anchored by a committed performance. As young Tonya, the outstanding McKenna Grace (so good in Gifted ) makes a very strong impression in her limited screen time. Her goodbye moment with her father is heartbreaking. But the big story here is Robbie, the film's co-producer and star, who trained intensively to pull off most of the role's physical demands. Her performance never feels as if it's manipulating us to feel sorry for Harding; rather, she seems to be getting down to business as a character. There's a lot to get behind with this version of Harding, and Robbie makes sure we're all with her. She's tough. She never feels as if she's commenting on the infamous character (even when breaking the fourth wall). Her courtroom scene is plain great acting. Without her convincing portrayal, the film wouldn't succeed in making us rethink Harding, the incident, and her fate.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how their opinions of real-life events are shaped by news stories and movies. What did you know about the Harding-Kerrigan incident before seeing I, Tonya ? What assumptions had you made? Did the movie change your mind? How accurately do you think the movie presents people and events?

How does the film portray domestic abuse? How did watching those scenes make you feel? Did they have more or less impact than other kinds of movie violence ?

What message does it send to see champion athletes smoking and doing drugs ? What's the intent of these scenes?

Why do you think the filmmakers chose to barely depict Kerrigan at all? Do you think the film is fair to Gillooly?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 8, 2017
On DVD or streaming : March 13, 2018
Cast : Margot Robbie , Allison Janney , Sebastian Stan , Julianne Nicholson
Director : Craig Gillespie
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studios : Neon , 30West
Genre : Comedy
Topics : Sports and Martial Arts
Run time : 119 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : pervasive language, violence, and some sexual content/nudity
Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
Last updated : July 25, 2024

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I, Tonya Film Review

Two incredible acting performances elevate the film

Based on a true story, I, Tonya is a raw, relentless journey through the life of controversial US ice skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie). Carried by strong performances from Tonya and her mother ( Allison Janney ), I, Tonya is an artistic film, bouncing between face to face interviews, creatively using this structure at key moments of the film that predominantly follows Tonya’s rise and eventual fall in the skating world. There’s a finely tuned balance between the comedy, drama and tragedy elements throughout and this really works in I, Tonya’s favour. A lack of likeable characters does give this biographical film a passive feel during some of the more intimate moments but thankfully it doesn’t detract too much from the appeal of this slickly made film.

I, Tonya begins with a series of interviews with key players that crop up through the 2 hour run time including Tonya, her mother and her estranged, abusive husband Jeff ( Sebastian Stan ). It’s here that the film first showcases some of its humour before shifting to show Tonya as a child as she’s first introduced to ice skating. Beginning as a 4-year-old and working up to the cusp of Olympic fame, the first half of the film is mired in optimism before the scandal that leads to Tonya’s fall from grace. I, Tonya is a well paced film that manages to handle the source material effortlessly without ever feeling contrived or over the top with the dramatic elements. The raw, emotionally charged narrative works well for the most part although the lack of emotional connection to any of the characters other than Tonya does dampen what’s otherwise a well written script.

Much like Darkest Hour last month, I, Tonya really feels like a platform to showcase the acting. Margot Robbie and Allison Janney absolutely steal the show, especially when they share the screen time. The supporting cast are good too but its these two lead actors that really stand out. One of the best scenes in the film shows a distraught Tonya sitting in front of a mirror trying to feign a smile and this tiny 30 second scene accentuates what great acting there is in this film. There are other little moments like this dotted throughout and thankfully the great script and acting is helped by some really slick editing and cinematography.

Technically, I, Tonya is very well presented too. There’s a unique punk rock feel to much of the run time and the conflict between Tonya’s skating and her personal life is well-balanced, doing a great job of showing just how far from grace Tonya falls. There’s some beautifully composed long shots on the ice that show off the technical skills of the skating and the rotating long shots in Tonya’s house as she’s arguing with Jeff accentuate how toxic their relationship has become. There are times where the music is a little overpowering though and with a number of tracks showing up throughout, I, Tonya does suffer somewhat from a relentless musical barrage that distracts unnecessarily from what’s happening on screen.

Despite a few set backs, I, Tonya is still a very well made film. A lack of likeability for many of the characters as well as an unusually high number of music tracks does take away from the film slightly but there’s enough here to look past this. Margot Robbie and Allison Janney steal the show with incredible performances, helped along by a very well written script, balancing the comedy and drama elements that work harmoniously together for much of the run time. I, Tonya isn’t perfect; it’s a little rough around the edges at times but there’s enough here to confidently say I, Tonya is a very good film and well worth watching.

Verdict - 7.5/10 7.5/10

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Movie Reviews

'i, tonya,' you, implicated.

Andrew Lapin

Toe Pick Your Battles: Margot Robbie is Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. 30West hide caption

Toe Pick Your Battles: Margot Robbie is Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

Tonya Harding was never supposed to be a pro figure skater. Like so many young American dreamers before her, she had it all wrong for success: born into the wrong class, raised by the wrong role model, drawn to the wrong men. And she had the wrong kind of femininity for the sport she loved, too, because those judges didn't want to see a ZZ Top routine from someone who sewed her own costume, even if it did include a flawlessly executed triple axel.

So when Harding did find a bit of glory, there were corrective measures in place, and her self-made undoing — by playing some part in the "hit" on U.S. rival Nancy Kerrigan's leg, the scandal that would unravel her career and the entire 1990s along with it — was the fitting, flaming end to her membership in the elite club that never wanted her anyway.

That is the argument put forth by I, Tonya , the cheeky and skate-sharp new biopic from director Craig Gillespie coming only a few short years after the ESPN documentary . The title tips us off that Harding's story — drawn from interviews with all the key players — has been rehabilitated into the stuff of tabloid Greek tragedy. This is a bold film, especially in its leveraging of all that real-life contradiction to create something that shocks and delights us with its own stylistic wrongness. I, Tonya takes greater risks with the biopic genre than any other in recent memory, and it's remarkable how much of it lands upright. It's the triple axel of based-on-a-true-story movies.

As played magnificently by Margot Robbie, Tonya is a powerhouse athlete, a fragile abuse victim, an impoverished country girl and a snarky media critic. Robbie embodies all these roles with a childlike sincerity, a lost-soul cluelessness, as her Tonya never ceases to wonder why it can't just be about the skating. She and the film whip among these personas with wild abandon, mixing styles and tones in a chaotic fashion that borders on overkill. (Must we indulge "present-day" interviews, voice-over AND talking directly to the camera?) But it all builds to a satisfying and illuminating portrait of a poor American girl who maybe never stood a chance.

The film's account of Harding's upbringing is so heartbreaking that it would be unbearable if it weren't presented in such a bouncy, off-kilter way. As a child in Oregon, she was practically shoved onto the ice by her waitress mother LaVona (a superb Allison Janney), partially because her mom sees talent but mostly because she is grooming Tonya for a future as the butt of her endless verbal and physical abuse. LaVona will hold the cost of Tonya's skating lessons over her head for the rest of her life, long after she compelled her daughter to drop out of school so she can focus on the sport.

Most of the film is devoted to Tonya's marriage to, and subsequent divorce from, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Although the Jeff in the "present day" sequences is muted and introspective, offering deep insights into how his decisions would go on to shape the culture, in the rest of the film, he is an abusive leech, incapable of offering anything to Tonya except psychological obsession as she climbs the ranks of U.S. Figure Skating. Their tumultuous relationship is marked by the cycle of Jeff's abuse (he hits her at home and later threatens her at gunpoint) followed by his blubbering, shameless apologies and Tonya's continued gravitation to him even after leaving him and filing a restraining order. Even these scenes, which are brutal enough to watch without the pop songs that punctuate them like thunderclaps, don't come close to reaching the real-life Harding's accounts of what Gillooly did to her. But abuse is complex, particularly if you live a sheltered, scrutinized existence, and one of the big strengths of I, Tonya is how it refuses to make its hero into a sap or her abusers into mere monsters. If they were, we wouldn't feel as affected by a moving (if a bit showoffy) long take of a post-divorce Jeff in various mopey positions around the house, inhabiting Tonya's negative space.

The film abruptly shifts gears into full-blown farce as we approach what everyone on screen refers to as "the incident": the attack that created the inescapable digital-video image of the innocent, white-dressed Kerrigan clutching her knee and wailing, "Why? Why?" Gillespie and screenwriter Steven Rogers know an inept hit job when they see one, and they milk this conspiracy of dunces for all it's worth. It's all orchestrated by Jeff's buddy and self-proclaimed Tonya bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Hauser, champion goober), who mimes criminal-mastermind behavior from inside his mom's basement; his "guys" get hyped for their job by blasting "Gloria"; and when it's all over and Shawn has blown his own cover, he insists to a TV reporter that he has training in "counterespionage and counterterrorism," despite all evidence to the contrary.

I, Tonya gets mushy on the question of exactly how much knowledge Tonya had of the incident, which is consistent with the intrigue that has surrounded this sordid saga ever since. But it takes the extra step of insisting the real culprits are us, the basic-cable mouth-droolers who hoovered up her every mistake because we love to watch train wrecks on ice. In fact, Tonya shames us right to our faces, an accusation we might take more seriously if the movie didn't seem to be trying so hard to reconnect with whatever electric qualities first hooked America on her story. Still, for as jolting an experience as watching the film can be, it does help Tonya live her truth, while revealing, from within all its wrongs, the basic truth of figure skating: It has never just been about the skating.

The 17 Greatest Horror Movie Remakes Ever

These remakes are scary good

You used to hear the refrain from horror film fanatics with a lot more frequency – the original was so much scarier .

And while this is still true to some degree (the films of John Carpenter have been remade with an oddly uniform lousiness), there are still plenty of horror films that have been remade well. Sometimes the remakes are just as good as the original. In rare cases, it even surpasses the original.

Here is our definitive list of the very best horror remakes ever.

Donald Sutherland in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978)

Don Siegel’s 1956 classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is based on Jack Finney’s story “The Body Snatchers,” which was serialized in Collier’s in 1954 and published as a novel shortly after, has been remade several times over the years. But the very best iteration is still the 1978 version, the first since Siegel’s, from director Philip Kaufman and writer W.D. Richter.

Kaufman wisely contemporizes the Cold War fears of the original, setting the movie in the hippie-dippy, free-love San Francisco of the 1970s and turning post-Watergate paranoia into bone-chilling scariness as an alien invasion starts replacing people. Donald Sutherland plays a health department official who starts to uncover the conspiracy, leading an all-star cast that also includes a young Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright and Art Hindle, with Leonard Nimoy turning in an odd, seductive turn as a psychiatrist and borderline guru. (Keep in mind there was an actual man named Dr. Spock who was a parenting guide and left-wing agitator in the 1970s.) Sexy, strange and deeply funny, the ‘70s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is an absolute triumph. When the movie was released, Variety said that it “validates the entire concept of remakes.”

The original story was adapted two more times after Kaufman’s ingenious version – 1993’s “Body Snatchers” and 2007’s “The Invasion” — the latter written by David Kajganich, whose new version of “Suspiria” can be found elsewhere on this list. “Body Snatchers,” directed by Abel Ferrara and written by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and frequent Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John, is the winner of the two latter iterations, setting the alien invasion on a military base and adding a weird sexual element. It’s been a while – we need a new “Body Snatchers” movie stat!

“Cat People” (1982)

“Cat People,” the Val Lewton-produced, Jacques Tourneur-directed feature from 1942, is a low-budget gem, the kind of movie that seems like the title came first, with the movie backward-engineered from there — because that’s exactly what happened.

Paul Schrader, who had just written “Raging Bull” and written and directed “American Gigolo,” is, at first, a lefthanded choice for director. But “Cat People” plays expertly into the filmmaker’s obsession with sexual power dynamics and the unprocessed id hiding just beneath the surface. Of course, these thematic concerns are made quite literal as Nastassja Kinski deals with the ancient animal lurking within. Malcolm McDowell matches her freak as her equally uninhibited brother, with John Heard, Ruby Dee and Annette O’Toole rounding out the cast.

“Cat People” is beautifully, unabashedly ‘80s – it has a slinky electronic score by Giorgio Moroder, features tons of full-frontal nudity and was executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer – just look at its poster . But this is a feature, not a bug. (The Moroder/David Bowie theme song that plays over the closing credits was reconstituted for Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.”) Imagine this movie being made today, stuffed with incest and ethereal surrealism. Would never happen. It could have only happened then. And we are so lucky to have it.

“The Thing” (1982)

A remake of Howard Hawks “The Thing From Another World”, based on the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr., was attempted for years with various filmmakers coming and going (including Tobe Hooper with his “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” collaborator Kim Henkel, whose “Moby Dick”-like pitch was partially set underwater, and John Landis). Eventually, John Carpenter boarded the project, coming off a string of successful low-budget thrillers, including “Halloween” and “Escape from New York,” utilizing a screenplay by “The Bad News Bears” writer Bill Lancaster that he proclaimed the best script he’d ever read.

Carpenter upped the intensity, turning the movie into an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, upping the gross-out creature effects, and suffusing it with choking, almost unbearable dread. The original film had a single creature, visualized as an actor in an unconvincing rubber costume. Carpenter’s creature, realized by make-up wizard Rob Bottin, is a shape-shifting nightmare that can be anything or anyone . Carpenter surrogate Kurt Russell stars as a helicopter pilot working at an Antarctic research center who uncovers a UFO stuck in the frozen tundra that soon unleashes a vicious alien force. The other researchers are played by character actor favorites Keith David, Wilford Brimley and Richard Masur, among others.

“The Thing” was released less than a month after the cuddly intergalactic companionship of “E.T.” and critics were not amused. Vincent Canby’s dismissive New York Times review said it was a “foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other.” In the years since, however, the movie has been rightly reclassified as one of Carpenter’s very best films, an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece whose themes of distrust and paranoia are even more powerful today. It has also served to inspire a crummy prequel (also called “The Thing”), an iconic episode of “The X-Files” (“Ice”) and Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” which also cast Russell, trapped a bunch of scumbags in a single place and even borrowed unused passages from Ennio Morricone’s moody score.

“The Thing” will never die.

Another 1950s drive-in favorite got a technological update in 1982 when David Cronenberg remade 1958’s delightfully silly “The Fly.” Both were based on a 1957 short story by George Langelaan that was published in Playboy magazine. Cronenberg’s approach was much more serious – the gradual mutation of genius scientist Seth Brundle (a perfectly cast Jeff Goldblum) into a hideous fly-creature following an accident in his teleportation pods, has been used as a metaphoric stand-in for everything from cancer to dementia to the burgeoning AIDS epidemic. (Cronenberg has shied away from direct comparisons.)

At its heart, the movie is a tender, tragic romance, with Brundle’s girlfriend, a journalist (Gena Davis), being forced to watch her lover waste away. (John Getz, in perfect ‘80s bad guy mode, is her slippery boss and former beau.) Cronenberg’s film is breathlessly paced and ruthlessly efficient, with the director working with many of his key collaborators, including cinematographer Mark Irwin, composer Howard Shore and make-up artist Chris Walas, (who won an Oscar for his work on “The Fly”), all of whom were working at the top of their game.

The resulting film is as heartbreaking as it is horrifying, something that resonated with critics (the Los Angeles Times proclaimed it an “artful remake of a tacky 1958 classic”) and audiences alike. A sequel, directed by Walas, was released in 1989 and a subsequent sequel, called “Flies,” championed by Davis and her then-husband Renny Harlin, was also developed in the 1990s. In the years since, another remake was tinkered with and Cronenberg himself periodically brings up his idea for a sequel — he already produced a live opera based on the film. Somewhere in Hollywood, another reboot is buzzing.

“The Blob” (1988)

Thirty years after the 1958 original, filmmaker Chuck Russell turned “The Blob” into a special effects-laden phantasmagoria and one of the very best horror movies of the 1980s. It follows the general set-up of the original film, with a meteor crash-landing in a small American town and unleashing a gluttonous goo that gobbles people up. It also maintains the original’s interest in teenage culture (Steve McQueen, damn near 30, played a high schooler in the original), with Kevin Dillon as a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is very right about the seriousness of the titular amoeba. But almost everything else has been updated, expanded and enhanced.

“The Blob” is, above all, a marvel of practical special effects, designed by the great Tony Gardner, with a number of iconic death sequences and set pieces built around the blob’s awesome destructive power. (A personal favorite is a moment when a character trapped in a phone booth not only discovers that another character has been consumed by the blob, but soon becomes a victim of it themselves.) Russell and his co-writer, future “Shawshank Redemption” filmmaker Frank Darabont, wisely never allow the threat to become too big and they even give themselves an out, should a “Blob” sequel be called upon. (It never was.)

Janet Maslin’s review for The New York Times said that the updated version was “more violent than the original, more spectacular, more cynical, more patently commercial and more attentive to detail.” In the years since its release, it has become a “they don’t make them like that anymore” favorite, a hand-crafted gross-out triumph of ingenuity and technical prowess.

Beware “The Blob.” But also embrace it.

“Psycho” (1998)

Arguably the most polarizing movie on this list, Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic is one of the boldest formal experiments in the history of mainstream cinema. This is what he chose to do with the unlimited freedom afforded him by the success of “Good Will Hunting.” God bless him.

Vince Vaughn stood in for Anthony Perkins, Anne Heche did her best Janet Leigh and Julianne Moore took over for Vera Miles. They said the same lines. Stood in the same places in the frame. But the movie had a very different tone and mood. Some of this had to do with the exemplary set design and costuming, which modernized the same elements from the original while feeling very much a part of Van Sant’s filmography; some of it had to do with the fact that the movie was now in (garish) color, courtesy of Wong Kar Wai’s go-to cinematographer Christopher Doyle; and then there were the little flourishes that Van Sant added – flashes inside of Norman Bates’ mind, a more explicit take on the shower scene and a truncated finale.

At the time, the film was accused of nothing less than cinematic necrophilia. But in the years since, the movie has (rightfully) achieved a begrudging appreciation, happily accepted by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh (who made a fan film intercutting moments from the original and Van Sant’s remake) and some who dismissed it initially. Such a heated response deserves a nice cold shower.

“The Ring” (2002)

The early 2000s saw a run of Westernized remakes of Japanese horror sensations (this won’t be the last on our list), but the very best is still Gore Verbinski’s redo of “The Ring.” The original 1998 film, directed by Hideo Nakata and based on the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, was a sensation. And for good reason. It’s scary as shit. Verbinski wisely maintained the conceit of the original, which concerned a haunted videotape that must be shown to three people or the original viewer will die, along with the image that scared an entire country (a ghostly little girl crawling out of a television to claim her victim) without much reinvention.

Naomi Watts plays a dogged journalist trying to discover the truth about the videotape and the curse itself, with Martin Henderson as her ex-husband. (Hilariously Daveigh Chase, who voiced Lilo in “Lilo & Stitch” that same year, plays the terrifying little girl Samara.) Verbinski was a master visual stylist, even then, creating a mood and atmosphere every bit as terrifying and singular as what the original film accomplished.

The film is also a product of judicious post-production, as the original version of the remake had much more sprawl – there was an entire subplot where Chris Cooper played a child murderer that is completely absent from the final film and a sequence that suggested the tape had been available in a video rental store – maintaining the core elements of the original film while sharply updating the textures was all that “The Ring” really needed. And it’s all the better off because of it.

2002 was probably the last year a movie about a cursed videotape could have been made (a malignant DVD doesn’t have quite the same oomph ). The movie was such a hit that it inspired countless spoofs and a pair of so-so sequels, with Nakata coming back to helm “The Ring Two.” But they lack the velveteen spookiness of Verbinski’s take.

“Willard” (2003)

“Willard” is the ideal source material for a modernized remake – based on “Ratman’s Notebooks” by Stephen Gilbert, the original film from 1972 and its sequel, “Ben,” released the following year, are so-so movies with a premise intriguing enough to withstand contemporized reinvention. This new take on the material was handled by Glen Morgan, who wrote and directed, and James Wong, who produced; a creative team that worked on some of the more iconic episodes of “The X-Files” and made movies like “Final Destination” and “The One.”

The title character is played by Crispin Glover, a man who has a closer relationship with animals than he does with humans – his elderly mother (Jackie Burroughs) berates him and his boss (R. Lee Ermey) is even more abusive. (He has a crush on his beautiful coworker, played by “Mulholland Drive” standout Laura Harring.) Willard is a weirdo, for sure, but in Glover’s capable hands, he’s a three-dimensional character, one who experiences pain, loss and disappointment. The rats he loves are an extension of himself, of the rage and sadness he holds inside. Not that “Willard” is without its more, er, primal pleasures. While somewhat neutered by a PG-13 rating (it would have been just as much of a box office disappointment with an R), it still manages to give us the goods, as in an extended sequence where the rats chase down a cat that Harring has given Willard.

And that’s the other thing about “Willard” – the level of animal acting that these rats are capable of is really something. (Yes, there is some CGI, but it’s used sparingly.) “Willard” serves as proof that no matter how iffy the source material is, a great remake is still possible. With or without dozens of live rats.

“Dawn of the Dead” (2004)

There are few horror movies as perfect as George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” A sequel of sorts to his “Night of the Living Dead,” released a decade before, it was, among other things, a takedown of American consumerism (on the cusp of Reaganomics) and a huge, full-bodied action film about a group of zombie survivors taking refuge in a shopping mall. Of course, their new normal is soon disrupted not only by the shambling undead but also by a group of chaotic bikers.

Sold at the time as a “re-envisioning,” the 2004 “Dawn of the Dead” was written by James Gunn and directed, in his feature debut, by Zack Snyder. In many ways, it’s still Snyder’s very best movie, a rip-snorting reimagining with a stellar cast (that includes Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer and Ty Burrell) and enough surprises to keep the fun going. Gunn wisely chose not to be slavishly devoted to the original movie. There are some new gross-out gags, too, along with the zombies taking on the fast-moving style of Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” as opposed to Romero’s shambling undead. Thankfully, the social commentary of Romero’s original is kept intact, with 2004 probably the last time in American history to set something like this in a mall.

Snyder would return to the zombie genre with Netflix’s “Army of the Dead,” described by some as a “spiritual successor” to his “Dawn of the Dead” (and initially developed by the same team). But without Gunn’s whip-smart script and knack for pacing, it was somewhat lacking.

“Dark Water” (2005)

The glut of 2000s horror movies based on Asian horror movies – among them, Verbinski’s excellent “The Ring” — also included the pretty good new version of “The Grudge” (helmed by original director Takashi Shimizu) and mostly forgettable fare like “One Missed Call,” “The Eye,” “Shutter” and “The Uninvited,” an unconvincing update of South Korean horror movie “A Tale of Two Sisters.” One of the very best, most underappreciated of this crop was “Dark Water,” directed by Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles.

Based on the 2002 movie of the same name, which was directed by original “Ring” director Hideo Nakata (itself based on a 1996 collection of stories by Koji Suzuki), the new “Dark Water” follows a recently divorced mother (Jennifer Connelly), who moves with her young daughter to an apartment on Roosevelt Island.

Smartly adapted by novelist and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias, “Dark Water” is filled with world-class character actors like John C. Reilly, Tim Roth and Pete Postlethwaite, maintaining the original movie’s sense of mood and atmosphere (and bummer ending) and adding new layers of creepiness, including a haunting score by regular David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Still somewhat underrated, “Dark Water” is ripe for rediscovery.

“Sorority Row” (2009)

“The House on Sorority Row,” a fairly scuzzy 1982 slasher movie, is the perfect movie to be adapted for modern audiences. The central conceit of the new “Sorority Row” is fairly straightforward and maintains much of the original story, with sorority sisters getting picked off one by one after they were involved in a fatal prank a few months earlier. But screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg (who will make another appearance on this list) and director Stewart Hendler wisely inject some much-needed humor, leading to a movie that gets as many laughs as it does screams (a pitch-perfect Carrie Fisher plays a cranky housemother).

Everything about “Sorority Row” is almost painfully 2009 – the cast includes Audrina Patridge from “The Hills” (she’s not bad) and the soundtrack includes jams from Franz Ferdinand, Dragonette and Ladytron. But it’s also a movie that really, really works, with more sex and violence than the tamer slashers of the time. And while the movie was a mild success when it was first released, it has become something of a cult favorite in the years since. It was even played during a recent horror movie film festival at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly movie theater.

We pledge “Sorority Row.” Always.

“Let Me In” (2010)

Few horror remakes have been turned around as quickly as the English-language version of “Let the Right One In,” the low-key Swedish sensation that was released in 2008. The remake rights were actually acquired by Hammer Films, the British film institute whose swinging, color horror movies were the lurid counterpart to Universal’s more stately horror favorites. They were trying to return to the big leagues but have gone quiet since, but“Let Me In” really should have put them back on the map.

Directed by Matt Reeves, who would go on to direct two “Planet of the Apes” installments and “The Batman,” the remake relocates the setting of Tomas Alfredson’s original film (and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel) to Los Alamos, New Mexico but retains the 1980’s time period. (Reeves said he was intrigued by the city’s density of geniuses.) Otherwise, he keeps the original’s odd friendship/love story between an awkward young boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the ageless vampire who looks like a little girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) pretty much intact, even borrowing shots and sequences from the original. But Reeves’ film is more ginger, thoughtful, sorrowful and stranger. And he wisely lost the subplot about another new vampire, including the laughable CGI cat attack sequence.

Reeves is aided in his cause by cinematographer Greig Fraser and composer Michael Giacchino, who both give exceptional work. While the movie was a disappointment, Stephen King called it the greatest horror film of the past 20 years and it was warmly reviewed by the New York Times and Roger Ebert . The original was a great film and the remake was a great film. How rare is that?

“Piranha” (2010)

French filmmaker Alexandre Aja found himself in the big of a remaking jag, applying his distinct sensibilities to Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes” and Japanese horror film “Mirrors.” These are good movies. But he really hit it out of the park with “Piranha 3D.”

It’s based on the 1978 film by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles as a kind of cheap-o rip-off of “Jaws,” produced by low-budget titan Roger Corman. (It was adapted once before, as part of a suite of Showtime movies based on Corman classics.) Aja moves the action from Texas to Lake Victoria, Arizona, and changes the titular aquatic threat from a military-engineered super-weapon to a race of ancient fish. (The original was very much made in the shadow of Vietnam.) The screenplay, by the “Sorority Row” duo of Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg similarly injects a humorous slant, from Jerry O’Connell shooting a “Girls Gone Wild”-style documentary to an appearance by Christopher Lloyd as a Doc Brown-style fish expert. But the greatest aspect of the rejuvenated “Piranha” is that Aja uses the movie as an excuse to critique American culture and its tendencies towards extreme excess, which culminates in a climactic bloodbath that puts the opening of “Saving Private Ryan” to shame. Aja is just as adept at suspense set pieces, building tension to an almost unbearable degree.

At 88 minutes, too, it never outstays its welcome. And while you can no longer enjoy the sight of O’Connell’s severed penis floating towards you in eye-popping 3D, “Piranha” remains an unsung classic of deliriously over-the-top proportions.

“Fright Night” (2011)

An update of “Fright Night” left us skeptical. The 1985 original, written and directed by Tom Holland, is a low-key classic , the kind of movie that plays like gangbusters at sleepovers and in late-night cable airings. (The sequel is also very good but was barely released, largely due to the murder of José Menéndez – seriously, look it up.)

The remake maintains the original’s sense of mystery, with Anton Yelchin as the young man who becomes convinced that his next-door neighbor (Colin Farrell, taking over for Chris Sarandon) is a vampire and seeks the advice of Peter Vincent (David Tennant taking over for Roddy McDowall), now a Las Vegas magician (instead of a late night horror host). Originally released in 3D but eye-popping no matter what format you watch it in, the script was updated by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” veteran Marti Noxon and directed by journeyman filmmaker Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”) with a helping hand from Steven Spielberg, who produced the movie and helped storyboard and edit the film.

The result is a low-key triumph, although one that barely made any money at the box office. (You got the sensation that Disney, distributing the movie through their Touchstone Pictures shingle, didn’t quite know how to properly market an R-rated horror comedy.) But time has already been kind to “Fright Night.” All that is missing is a 4K home video release from a fan-favorite boutique label. That’ll come soon enough. This movie is too good to be lost.

“The Town That Dreaded Sundown” (2014)

Bet you didn’t even know that there was a remake to Charles Pierce’s creepy-crawly 1976 movie, did you? (The original film was loosely based on real-life killings that happened in Texarkana in 1946.) That’s because the remake, smartly adapted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and directed (with aplomb) by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) and produced by Ryan Murphy was hastily re-edited at the eleventh hour and barely released by Blumhouse and Orion Pictures.

It’s such a shame because the movie is so smart and so clever, a wild, metatextual slasher movie that incorporates the events of the 1946 killings and the original movie itself, to chart a brand new, knotty path. The movie has a killer cast (led by Addison Timlin and including Veronica Cartwright, Gary Cole, Joshua Leonard, Edward Herrmann, Anthony Anderson and Denis O’Hare), stunning cinematography by Michael Goi and a creepy score by future Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson.

“The Town That Dreaded Sundown” deserved to be the next “Scream.” Instead, it wound up as an oddball obscurity. But it always has the chance of becoming a cult classic. Let’s make it happen!

“Suspiria” (2018)

A remake of “Suspiria” was promised – maybe threatened in the right word — for a decade before the film was actually made. Dario Argento’s 1977 film of the same name, which followed a young American dancer (Jessica Harper) who trains at a ballet school run by witches, was regularly cited as one of the scariest movies ever made. After an attempt was made by David Gordon Green, (who would finally get his chance to take on a horror classic with his “Halloween” films and “The Exorcist: Believer,”) “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers” filmmaker Luca Guadagnino shepherded the remake to the screen.

For Guadagnino, his intent was simple: make a movie that felt like what it was like to watch the original. He wisely sidestepped the hallmarks of the 1977 version – where that film popped with vivid primary colors, his is doused in muted, autumnal hues; where that film featured little actual dancing, his borders on an outright musical (with music from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, no less); where that film failed to engage with politics, his brings in everything from the Berlin wall to the Holocaust.

It’s a wide-ranging, expansive film, complete with chapter headings and Tilda Swinton playing several roles ( including Dr. Josef Klemperer, a male Holocaust survivor ). For a movie about a haunted ballet studio, it clocks in at a whopping 152 minutes. For some, it was all too much, particularly during the movie’s gruesome exploding-witches finale. But if you are tuned into Guadagnino’s very specific wavelength, it’s electrifying and deeply felt.

Dakota Johnson’s slinky, knowing performance as the dewy American prodigy, is one of her very best. And Guadagnino’s sensitive direction constitutes some of his greatest work, as the women in his story are complex, sad, frightened and frightening. At the time, the filmmaker said that he almost called the movie “Suspiria: Part One.” The movie ultimately didn’t make enough money to call for a sequel, recouping half of its budget. But the possibility of more “Suspiria” is endlessly fun to think about.

“Hellraiser” (2022)

A remake of 1987’s “Hellraiser,” and a fresh adaptation of “The Hellbound Heart,” a 1986 novella by horror legend Clive Barker, was in development since at least 2007. It was complicated by Dimension, run by Bob Weinstein, who insisted on releasing lousy sequels as a way of holding onto the rights. (They would sometimes just graft “Hellraiser” icon Pinhead into completely unrelated scripts as a way of maintaining the license.)

We finally got a new movie after Dimension was defunct. And what a movie it is. Director David Bruckner and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski wisely jettison much of the chunky “Hellraiser” lore, instead focusing on a young woman (Odessa A’zion) who, while battling addiction, winds up with the demonic puzzle box that opens a gateway to hell. Bruckner also wisely cast Jamie Clayton, a spellbinding transgender actress, as the Priest, aka Pinhead. (That’s right, a lady Pinhead!) While this new “Hellraiser” doesn’t feel as transgressive and truly dangerous as Barker’s original, it is still scary and kinky and fun. It’s a shame that viewership wasn’t what it needed to be, because it would have been cool as hell to get several more movies with Clayton as Pinhead, under Bruckner’s stylish direction. Sigh .

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Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), Sept. 8, 2017. Running time: 121 MIN.

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