The awards season is definitely looming, and almost everyone is getting real excited to know who's about to win. One of the strongest contenders for this year is Still Alice, a movie depicting the challenges of having early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
The 2014 film, which was based in a best-selling novel published in 2007 by Lisa Genova, features Julianne Moore who plays the titular character Alice Howland. She's working as a cognitive psychologist who then develops Alzheimer's disease even when she's still far from 65 years old, the average age for the disease to set in.
In the movie's recent trailer, we can see Alice forgetting some information during a talk and not knowing where she was while she was running even if it seemed she's been following the same route for a long time.
The movie is a sleeper hit especially when it was released for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival. Since then, critics have never stopped pouring their appreciation and praise not only to the movie but to the ensemble as well, particularly Moore, who many believe might finally take home the coveted Oscars for Best Actress.
Rotten Tomatoes, a popular review aggregator, gives the movie 87% score while Metacritic gives it 71, which is the mean rating of 5 reviews (so far). Time's review, meanwhile, gives the spotlight to Moore when it said she "revealed Alzheimer's from the inside."
In an interview with Indiewire, Moore said that research played a huge role for her honest portrayal of the character and that she might have never said yes to the project if she wasn't given enough time to do it. She researched for about 4 months while filming her other movies including Hunger Games: Mockingjay. She watched every documentary she can get her hands on and talked to real people who have suffered early-onset Alzheimer's. She joined support groups as well. It already has its U.S. release last December 5.