Still Alice (2014) - Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

Alice Howard, a happily married woman with three grown children, is a renowned linguistics professor at a prestiges university.  Along with her husband, another acclaimed intellectual, they live a seemingly perfect life together doing what they love.  When Alice recieves a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, her world is flipped outside down, with this terrible disease slowly testing her resolve as well as the relationships with everyone she loves.  Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland's Still Alice is an intimate and heartbreaking examination of Alzheirmer's disease, showing the incredible debilatating disease for what is it, a destructive force.  Still Alice captures the true horror of a disease that slowly strips away all memory, with Alice a once proud intellectual type slowly losing the ability to form basic sentences.  Julianne Moore gives a great performance as Alice, capturing the vulnerability of a once proud woman coming to grasps with a mind that is simply deteriorating.  Alice being a linguistics teacher was a clever character decision, with the film juxtaposing Alice's intellectual prowess with the diseases destructive forces, stripping away Alice's ability to remember even simple words in conversation. This is a disease that slowly stripes away all memory, and the film does a great job at capturing how important that is to identity, with Alice becoming a woman who has lost complete semblance of the woman she once was.  While the film's dialogue leaves something to be desired at times, Still Alice uses a detailed approach to present an authentic look into Alzheimer's disease, revealing the strain it has not only on the individual, but anyone and everyone she loves.  

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