Julianne Moore is earning career-high accolades as Alice Howland, a 50-year-old academic who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The irony of a professor of linguistics losing her verbal faculties is a bitter one, and is driven home by telling the story from Alice’s perspective—a rarity for films about neurological decline.
Moore’s performance has already garnered Best Actress wins at The Gotham Awards and National Board of Review. Writing for FILM COMMENT’s Essential Cinema, Molly Haskell says: “For the past three decades Moore has been the high-wire artist of her generation, blithely unconcerned with safety, with protecting herself as an actress. Yet strangely, after all her roles as women in various forms of meltdown, of loneliness and despair, Alice is in some ways her most grounded character. She is more in possession of herself, there’s a density of being that forever escapes her more marginal characters… Moore has created a mesmerizing portrait of a woman possessed by a disease but also still possessed of a self.”
