SummaryAlice Howland (Julianne Moore), a successful Columbia University linguistics professor happily married with three grown children, struggles to maintain her mind after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.
SummaryAlice Howland (Julianne Moore), a successful Columbia University linguistics professor happily married with three grown children, struggles to maintain her mind after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.
Julianne Moore gives the performance of her career (no mean feat, given the strength of her previous work) in this heartbreaking yet life-affirming tale of a woman determined to hold onto her identity while under attack from a debilitating mental disease.
Still Alice is complete on its own simplicity. An important reminder for caring about the ones who suffer with that sad disease and the need of attention for them. The highlight for Juliane Moore's performance is indispensable, it's magnific!
Julianne Moore is finally getting her Oscar. Her character really affected me. I keep going back to Alice every time I suffer a memory lapse, which is quite frequent at my age of 60. She did an excellent job of showing the symptoms by the despair and agony of the disease. The supporting cast completed the picture of how the entire family suffers.
Moore gives a controlled portrait of emotional implosion, bringing quietly heartbreaking nuances to a calm, considered treatment of a life-shattering situation.
For all the movie’s honesty, the reality of Alzheimer’s disease is a lot worse than what you see in Still Alice. Perhaps directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland made a calculation as to how much an audience can take. They were right.
Elements of its plot have the standard quality of a Hallmark production, and the work of some of the film's costars is a bit too on the nose. But, with Moore and Stewart on the case, we feel the presence of something real here, something that can't be shrugged off or ignored.
Time and again, as it comes to the next stage of deterioration or distress, it flinches. Try laying it beside Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which shows the effect of a stroke on an elderly woman, no less refined than Alice, and on her loved ones. Haneke knows the worst, and considers it his duty to show it; Glatzer and Westmoreland want us to know just enough, and no more.
Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.
Movies can be important and make people think about serious issues and the human side of it. good filmmakers don't need to make it artsy or weird to bring to it the quality and substance dialogs to make it more than a "Hallmark type more".
Still Alice is an outstanding character driven movie, with its precise tone music score, simple but elegant Cinematography with incredibly amazing performances. The support characters are really there to support the main character and the support actors really até conscious of that, making the outstanding job of gives to Julianne Moore all the conditions for do we job. Kristen Stewart, as always, go along, at the same level, with the monster actors and actresses of our time. The scenes between her and Moore are the best of the movies. There are so deep, real and simple. They really are living the moment. All the other actors do an amazing job to. Great Ensemble cast. Moore do her thing as always. What an amazing actress.
So.. Still Alice is one of the best movies of 2014 and between the best movies of all times about serious and important diseases that affect hugely all human beings.
I, as a 54 yrs old woman with a familiar history of dementia and minor autism, could not be more affect and freaked out. The book was very difficult for me to read but the movie did justice to it.
Don't miss it. Go and see Still Alice! If not just to watch Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart to give outstanding performances.
Still Alice is a simple and digestible film, it approaches its subject with class and dignity and it does not shamelessly tries to blackmail its audience neither morally, nor emotionally, as I said being a simple movie, its power rests in its script and the enormous performance provided by Julianne Moore.
Honestly I recommend it, I know that many will find it enjoyable, others may not but that's how this works.
Interesting/frightening/depressing for its subject matter, but I agree that it felt a bit like a TV movie, except with better actors. It strayed into melodrama at times, for example in the scenes between mother and rebellious daughter, and the speech scene complete with the audience wiping their eyes.
It did almost feel like it was designed to deliver Julianne Moore an Oscar. And she was very good, but I can't help feeling that a role like that is manna from heaven for any decent actor. Alec Baldwin's less sympathetic role was possibly the more challenging?
It was just fine. The movie was a bit clunky and the casting was terrible. Alec Baldwin had no business being cast in this film other than to ensure a high profile name for a big release. Julianne Moore is exquisite and truly should have won the oscar. But the emotional beats felt somewhat interrupted, almost jumpy and lost. The tone of the film could have been more cohesive.. All in all it was fine. Nothing great here.
I want my money back. This was the most depressing film we attended this year or last. There was no real emotions shown by the actors or actress. The film used may be recyclable. Having family the suffers from metal illness from aging this movie did not speak to that or the future.