Critic’s Corner

At this fall’s Emmy Awards, Gena Rowlands and Laura Linney ’86 won best-actress awards for their performances as an embattled mother and daughter in the 2001 Showtime movie Wild Iris. Linney plays a widowed alcoholic who moves home with her mother and teenage son. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Julie Salaman praised the “clarity and grace” of the acting. “Ms. Linney’s portrait of a drunk is one of the movie’s small triumphs,” she wrote. “She isn’t melodramatically sloppy but realistically sneaky and sad.”