REVIEW: Still Alice (dir. Glatzer / Westmoreland)

'There’s always seemed something masklike about Julianne Moore’s face: she seems walled in by her beauty. When she smiles, the only thing that moves is her mouth; that superb fenderwork of bone remains as impassive as a sphinx. This very inexpressiveness gives her of an air of trapped intelligence which she used to great effect in the early part of her career playing a string of numbed out beauties— her coked-up porn actress in Boogie Nights; her neurasthenic housewives in Safe and Far From Heaven, all dying behind the eyes. More recently she has cut loose to channel something of Diane Keaton’s jangled-nerve comedy in The Kids Are Alright, in which her performance was a revelation: Moore has never been so loose or so funny. In Still Alice, she plays a victim on early-onset Alzheimer’s and you can see why they gave her an Oscar for it. It’s like watching a career retrospective only in reverse: come see the more radiant, vivacious Julianne Moore of late regress into one of her early pathos-of-emptiness roles.'  

— from my review of Still Alice for The Spectator