Ashley Judd, Pulp Queen

Wishing Ashley Judd a happy 50th birthday this week. Here's Chris Feil.

Ashley Judd deserves some credit that’s mostly only afforded to television actresses: she’s a pulp queen. It’s like a horror movie scream queen, except for midrange crime thrillers that your dad loves. But when the movie gods dealt her a standard genre exercise she could elevate it to something incredibly watchable, like a femme fatale without all the trappings of a leacherous male gaze.

Judd would eventually riff on the dingiest of pulp for her greatest performance in Bug, but mainstream audiences are more likely to remember her for her cinematic entanglements with the courtroom, espionage, and serial killers...

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