Home > Drama >

Still Alice

Watch Now

Still Alice (2014)

December. 05,2014
|
7.5
|
PG-13
| Drama
Watch Now

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children, is a renowned linguistics professor who starts to forget words. When she receives a devastating diagnosis, Alice and her family find their bonds tested.

...

Watch Trailer

Cast

Similar titles

Reviews

Evengyny
2014/12/05

Thanks for the memories!

More
SnoReptilePlenty
2014/12/06

Memorable, crazy movie

More
Steineded
2014/12/07

How sad is this?

More
Platicsco
2014/12/08

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

More
paulclaassen
2014/12/09

This is a truly remarkable film. It puts Alzheimers in a whole new perspective - how it affects those around the patient as well. Julianne Moore is excellent! The film is very natural, never becoming sentimental. The story and acting from the entire cast is superb. For someone who went through something similar on a personal level, this was touching, sad and heart wrenching. Although it was clear what was to come, I really loved the movie's ending. This was STUNNING!

More
jackVSjack
2014/12/10

I had this film for a long time before I watched it. When I heard about it I wanted to go see it. But knowing the subject matter I wasn't crazy about the certainty of crying non stop in the cinema.I don't personally know anybody that had or has Alzheimer's. So I can only view this film through my imagined idea of what it would be like to be part of a family that this terrible condition touches. From my narrow viewpoint I think that the cast and crew did a fantastic job in demonstrating in a more passive way how it affects the family. Their part of the story is important but the film doesn't go out of its way to over dramatise every possible conflict that will arise from living with someone that has Alzheimer's.I also felt and rightly so, that the more important point was to focus on Alice herself. Julianne Moore in my mind does a fantastic job in taking the viewer along with her.I passed over this film numerous times knowing how it would make me feel. Ever since I saw Iris I knew from past experience that this would be a difficult film to watch. While Iris brought a more turbulent narrative to the screen and reflected how monstrous and destructive Alzheimer's is. Still Alice offered an additional focus. How it can hit a younger person and how devastatingly quickly it can dismantle a mind.I have watched it now and can now recommend it to others. But I doubt I will ever watch it again.Not because it isn't an impressive piece of story telling! But because in the words of Chandler Bing. "It's like someone literally wrote down my worst nightmare and then charged me $32 to see it!"It is important for these stories to be told.

More
sol-
2014/12/11

Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, a middle aged university professor tries to deal with the increasing confusion and uncertainty that comes with the condition in this emotionally charged drama. Best known for the fact that it won Julianne Moore what many considered to be an overdue Oscar, she is very good here and quite likely richly deserved to win. Moore captures the gradual stages of neurological decline with remarkable finesse and the writing/directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland afford her several moments to shine. An especially effective sequence has her enter her home and go from room to room in search of the bathroom, only to find herself in a near labyrinthine maze, opening and reopening doors that she has already tested. The first doctor's appointment that we see might be Moore's best scene though as the camera lingers on her face for minutes on end with a disembodied doctor's voice that is seen but never heard. Where the film disappoints though is in the depiction of the impact on Moore's family. She has three adult children, but we only ever get to know one in any real depth and while Alec Baldwin has several strong moments as her concerned husband, there are some odd moments in which we are unsure whether he cares more about his job, yet this angle then just fades away towards the end. It is a minor issue though in what is overall a touching, scary and thought-provoking film. Just what would it be like to lose your sense of personal identity altogether? Food for thought for sure.

More
HB
2014/12/12

I've been hearing for a while now that it's Julianne Moore's year. If you ask me, every year should be Julianne Moore's year, but nevertheless, this is the conventional wisdom being passed around by those who make their living spending an unseemly amount of time tracking the Academy Awards as if it were some sort of horse race that actually matters.Best that I can tell, 2014 was considered an unusually weak year in the Best Actress field, even by Hollywood's horrid standards of roles for women. I didn't think it was weak at all, but I suppose if we must restrict our choices to American films deemed by industry insiders as Oscar Contenders that were also released by distributors that can afford to mount multi-million dollar awards campaigns, then yes, it probably was. (Don't get me started.) So, much like a few years ago when Jeff Bridges received his lifetime achievement, gold-watch Oscar for a mediocre picture nobody saw, Julianne Moore has become the presumptive front-runner for a middling movie that hasn't even come out yet. She's overdue. Everybody loves her. It's time.It also helps that Still Alice is the kind of movie that wins Academy Awards. It's tasteful to a fault, exploring a terrifying subject with the utmost decorum. You feel bad when it's over, but not too bad. Adapted from Lisa Genova's novel by the married writing-directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the film stars Moore as Alice Howland, a super-cerebral linguistics professor at Columbia University, stricken with early onset Alzheimer's.There's no way for a movie about Alzheimer's disease to not be inherently horrifying. An awful part of life is that we all eventually learn to accept that our bodies will someday betray us, but the mind is a totally different matter. Losing physical ability is sadly inevitable; losing comprehension is the stuff of nightmares. Moore, a brilliant actress, does an expectedly outstanding job conveying Alice's slow drift away from the world. Confusion gives way to helplessness, and then terrible fear.If only the movie deserved Moore's precision work, and if only there were more to this character than the cheap irony of a language professor losing her words. Still Alice is set in the plush, weirdly stilted upper Manhattan that I only thought existed whenever Woody Allen used to try and make a tragedy about WASPs. Everything is so genteel and cushioned, exemplified by Alec Baldwin's uncharacteristically terrible turn as her research scientist husband, coiffed in a $500 haircut inexplicable for a lab rat while over-enunciating some seriously awkward dialogue.It all feels so timid and Hallmark-ish, particularly when stacked against previous, gut-wrenching Alzheimer's dramas like Iris and Away From Her, films that rooted around in the husband's POV with a conflicted, messy anxiety Still Alice keeps carefully at bay. This is a movie of pristine surfaces, and an over-determined camera strategy that has the other performers receding out of focus as Moore's facilities narrow.The one rogue element here is Kristen Stewart's outstanding performance as Moore's black-sheep daughter, who earned her mother's ire while struggling to get started as an actress in the downtown theatre scene. The rest of Still Alice's supporting cast (including a wretched Kate Bosworth) is fussy and self-conscious, Stewart simply is. There's such a rawness to her talent, so we all really need to get over the easy Twilight jokes and embrace her sullen unpredictability and lanky moments of unexpected grace. She's the real deal.Glatzer and Westmoreland certainly know what they've got here. In lieu of an ending of their own, they just have Stewart read aloud from Tony Kushner's Angels in America. She sells the heck out of an emotional crescendo that someone else wrote about a totally different frightening disease, so even the climax is borrowed and once-removed.I don't care whose year it is, these two actresses deserved better.

More