'Still Alice' reviews from the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival

"Still Alice" had it's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday 8 September 2014. 

First reviews and reactions from this screening:

THR 

With some five million Americans (and 36 million world-wide) living with Alzheimer’s disease, the warm, compassionate but bitingly honest Still Alice will touch home for many people. The toll the disease takes on the life of a brilliant linguistics professor is superbly detailed by Julianne Moore in a performance that is one of her career highs, driving straight to the terror of the disease and its power to wipe out personal certainties and identity. Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the screenplay is faithful to Lisa Genova’s best-selling novel which has a fan base of its own.

Rather than focus on the destructive effect of the disease on relationships, the drama dives deep into how one woman experiences her own deteriorating condition, placing all the emphasis on Moore’s face and reactions, her vulnerability seesawing with her strength. This insider’s account would be a tall order for any actor to fill without resorting to sentimentality or falling into the obvious, but she never loses control of the film for a second, with able support from Kristen Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish as family members. The involvement of the Alzheimer’s Association and executive producing names like Christine Vauchon, Maria Shriver and Trudie Styler will offer an additional leg up, although word-of-mouth should provide the strongest incentive for audiences leery of the topic.

Alice Howland is a vivacious, charming 50-year-old New Yorker and a respected intellectual who is a precision communicator. Her loving husband John (Baldwin) calls her the smartest, most beautiful woman he’s ever met, and their three grown children Anna (Bosworth), Tom (Parrish) and aspiring actress Lydia (Stewart) are, if not success stories, at least making their way in life. Alice has it all—until she begins to forget words, which are her livelihood as a Columbia linguistics teacher, and worse, starts to lose her bearings in familiar places. She’s frightened enough to consult a neurologist who rules out a brain tumor, but hypothesizes early-onset Alzheimer’s, a rare form of the disease that strikes people under 65.

Alice’s first reaction is to hide it, but after getting confused about a dinner guest, she makes her husband privy to her fears. As her doctor tells them bluntly, her disease is genetic and the chances of their children contracting it are 50%. It falls on the family like a bomb, especially when one of the kids tests positive for the rogue gene. But this bad news is quickly sidelined by Alice’s own mental decline as the disease makes terrible, swift progress. While her family tries to cope with the situation, or miserably fails to do so, the cast’s ensemble performance brings out their true colors, which include some surprising role changes.

Despite a 2-hour running time, the drama is swift-moving, perhaps because the viewer dreads the disease's progression and wishes time would stop for poor Alice. But it doesn't stop and step by step she descends the cognitive ladder, not suffering so much as struggling to stay connected. In one stand-out scene, she stumbles onto suicide instructions she has left for herself on her computer. Though this is one of the film's most intense scenes, the directors are able to slip in a moment's humor to lighten things up.

Not all is doom and gloom here. Another key scene has Alice invited to address an Alzheimer's conference. Her anxious preparations end in a triumphant monolog about her condition that is truly touching.

Westmoreland and Glatzer have created drama around the porn industry (The Fluffer), the Mexican community in Los Angeles (Quinceanera) and Errol Flynn’s last fling with a teenage girl (The Last of Robin Hood.) Still Alice has a concentration and urgency in the telling that the other films lack. Not directors known for daring cinematic fireworks or experimentation, here they tackle a subject where a restrained, understated approach is the best insurance against sloppy sentimentality. It pays off handsomely in the film’s closing moments, a poignant, poetic confrontation between the generations that draws the best from Moore and reveals unexpected depth in Stewart. The film's extremely personal feeling is surely related to the fact that Glatzer directed it while undergoing a health crisis of his own after being diagnosed with ALS and having to co-direct the movie on an iPad using a text-to-speech app.

Tech work remains humbly in the background, all in the service of keeping the spotlight focused on Moore and mimicking her feelings with an out of focus camera, costumes she no longer chooses herself, and so on.

Hit Fix

TORONTO — Julianne Moore has already had quite a year. In May, she surprised many by taking the Best Actress honor at the Cannes Film Festival for David Cronenberg’s “Map to the Stars.” On Monday night, “Still Alice” premiered at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival and it may feature one of the finest performances of her already illustrious career.

If you were to read a short synopsis of “Alice,” an adaptation of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel, you might be slightly concerned. The film introduces us to Alice Howland, a Columbia University professor in linguistics who has balanced a successful career with a happy marriage and three grown children. She’s just turned 50, but notices that she’s starting to forget things. Specific words are dropping out of her mind. She’ll be in the middle of a lecture and forget a phrase or subject matter. Eventually she goes to a neurologist who reveals she has early onset Alzheimer’s. It’s rare for her age, but it’s a familial condition she likely inherited from a father she rarely saw in his later years. Rapidly deteriorating, Alice has to decide how she’ll live out the rest of her life knowing she’ll be a burden to the rest of her family.

In the hands of the wrong director(s), “Alice” could be overly melodramatic and laced with saccharine moments meant to force a happy ending. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland won’t let that happen. The duo behind the critically acclaimed “Quinceañera” let the film's narrative unspool in as restrained a manner as possible. There are no unbelievable hysterics. There are no self-aware screaming matches. Instead, the focus is on Moore’s heartbreaking depiction of a woman slowly losing her focus, her memory and, to some extent, herself.

Moore’s performance here is reminiscent of her breakthrough role in Todd Haynes' “Safe” and her Oscar-nominated turn in Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours.” In each scene she peels a little bit more of Alice away as the emotional pain of the disease takes its toll. It is incredibly subtle work that has to have been painstakingly thought out. You only realize this, however, walking out of the theater. Moore won’t let you see her working behind the curtain.

Another Toronto debut, “The Theory of Everything,” has earned raves for Eddie Redmayne’s uncanny transformation into Stephen Hawking. Moore’s work here is just as transformative as Redmayne’s, but her arc is mental rather than physical. As anyone who has a relative or friend who has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease knows, the Alice we meet at the beginning of the film will not be the Alice we meet at the end. And because of that the film lives and dies on Moore’s portrayal. She succeeds smashingly.

Glatzer and Westmoreland put an accomplished ensemble around Moore to play Alice’s family including Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart and Hunter Parrish. Stewart, as Alice’s youngest daughter, is the family member who seems to be affected by her mother’s deterioration the most (and earns the most screen time), but all of the actors clearly know they are there to support Moore. This is Alice’s story and no one else’s.

Below the line, cinematographer Denis Lenoir avoids the Hollywood sheen, instead composing a delicate and natural look. Ilan Eshkeri (“The Young Victoria”) deserves a special mention for his beautiful score that also avoids unnecessarily pulling the audience’s heartstrings.

Variety

When the movies deal with Alzheimer’s, they nearly always approach it from the vantage of the family members who are painfully forgotten as loved ones lose their memories. “Still Alice” shows the process from the victim’s p.o.v., and suddenly the disease isn’t just something sad that happens to other people, but a condition we can relate to firsthand. Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario — a low-key approach that should serve this dignified indie well in limited release.

Based on the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, “Still Alice” gives new meaning to the phrase, “It happens to the best of us.” Columbia professor Alice Howland is the sort of character who, even without Alzheimer’s to contend with, is accomplished and interesting enough to warrant her own movie. She has achieved much in her 50-odd years, both as a respected scholar and mother of three grown children, played by Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish.

For the otherwise healthy Alice, there’s no good reason why Alzheimer’s should strike now, nearly 15 years before it traditionally occurs, although, as her doctor points out, the condition can actually be harder to diagnose in intelligent people, since they’re capable of devising elaborate work-arounds that mask the problem. Genova’s book hit especially close to home for husband-and-husband helmers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (“Quinceanera”), since Glatzer suffers from ALS — another degenerative condition that systematically attacks one’s sense of self.

At first, it’s just a word that goes missing in the middle of one of Alice’s linguistics lectures. But the situation gets scarier when she loses track of where she is during her daily jog. Since Alice’s disease involves short-term memory loss, a number of the tests she faces are ones the audience can take alongside, with the inevitable result that we start to reflect on the blind spots in our memory. Forgetting things isn’t unusual even among perfectly healthy adults, making it easy to identify with Moore, who plays her initial concerns quite casually.

It’s not until Alice learns that the disease is hereditary that the severity of her situation sets in: As if it weren’t bad enough that she will eventually cease to recognize her own children, Alice may also be responsible for passing the condition along to them. This is a tragedy, pure and simple, and yet the directing duo refuses to milk the family’s situation for easy tears. Instead, the idea is to put us inside Alice’s head. We experience disorientation as she would, suggested by a shallow depth of field where things shown out of focus appear to be just beyond her comprehension.

Alice’s diagnosis calls for a form of grieving, during which she tries coming to terms with the fact that life as it had previously existed is now over. She tells the department chair at Columbia U., where she taught, about her Alzheimer’s and is promptly dismissed from her position. She gets lost in her own home and is easily overwhelmed whenever she steps out of it. Though her husband John (Alec Balwin) aims to be supportive, he refuses to let her condition derail his own professional life. Alice begs him to take a year off work so they can be together before she’s too far gone to experience her own life, making visits to retirement homes and making contingency plans (a bottle of sleeping pills stashed at the back of a dresser drawer) for the day when she can no longer answer a series of personal questions about her life.

The directorial couple must have gone through something very similar when Glatzer’s ALS kicked in, forcing him to accept that his body had become his greatest enemy. The pair bring that personal connection to the writing process, emphasizing Alice’s emotions over those of her various family members — although Stewart, whose character steps in as caregiver at one point, gets several intimate, unshowy scenes with Moore. The helmers have made a conscious decision to keep things quiet, commissioning a score from British composer that doesn’t tell you how to feel, but rather how she feels: lost, emotional and anxious most of the time.

Clearly, Glatzer has not yet given up, and neither does Alice, despite her relatively rapid degeneration. It’s a devastating thing to watch the light of recognition dwindle in her eyes, to see the assertive, confident lecturer that she had so recently been reduced to the nervous, scared woman we see delivering one last speech at an Alzheimer’s society confab. After the stiff lifelessness of “The Last of Robin Hood,” the helmers have made a near-total recovery, shooting things in such a way that activity is constantly spilling beyond the edges of the frame, giving the impression that characters’ lives continue when they’re not on camera, even as Alice’s seems to be closing in around her. Just as her kids look for ever-fainter signs of their mother behind those eyes, we lean in to watch Moore the actress turn invisible within her own skin.

Screendaily

Offered as proof that there actually might be some things worse than death — or at least more heartbreaking — the exquisite Still Alice presents the sad story of Alice Howland, a brilliant linguistics professor decimated by early-onset Alzheimer’s. A melodrama of substance, the new film from writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (Quinceañera) is led by a precise performance from Julianne Moore, but the film is really an ensemble piece that looks closely at one family’s struggles when its matriarch is alive but slowly losing herself piece by piece.

Tearjerkers get a bad rap because of how shamelessly manipulative they are, but Still Alice earns its tears by exploring emotional terrain with restraint and insight.

Still Alice premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and should be an art-house player thanks to a cast that also includes Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth. Good reviews for Moore’s performance will attract viewers, and readers of the source material (Lisa Genova’s original novel) may be intrigued as well. Although there might be a concern that the subject will be too heavy for some audiences, the modest indie success of the low-budget Away From Her (also about Alzheimer’s) suggests that discriminating crowds will be game.

Moore plays Alice, an author who lectures on linguistics and teaches at Columbia University as the film begins. But tragedy is about to intervene: Even though she’s only 50, she notices that she keeps forgetting vital things, such as where she is when going for a jog through New York City, even though she’s taken the route many times before. Soon after, she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, being told by her doctor that the condition will only get worse. The bulk of the film concerns how she and her family, including her husband John (Baldwin) and daughters Lydia (Stewart) and Anna (Bosworth), cope with the news.

Preferring a spare, understated style, Glatzer and Westmoreland mostly let the inherent sadness of the situation speak for itself. (Occasionally, though, Ilan Eshkeri’s score can become a little self-consciously frenetic, a clumsy attempt to echo Alice’s panic at her worsening memory loss.) But despite the rare tonal lapses, the film does a remarkable job of homing in on the story’s core terror: Alice is still physically well and could live a long life, but her essence — her mind, her memories and her spark — will soon disappear forever.

In the wrong hands, this is the stuff of disease-of-the-week sentimentality, but Still Alice stays away from that terrain by focusing less on the illness than on the emotional effects it has on all involved. Of course, the movie is most interested in Alice’s reactions to her diagnosis, but no one in her immediate circle is immune to these changes. Baldwin is particularly good as an ambitious medical researcher who is losing not just his wife but also a woman who was as driven as he was. John shows plenty of compassion for Alice, but Baldwin also reveals the cracks in the husband’s patience, powerless to bring back the woman he once knew, even though she’s right there.

Still Alice is such a rich, well-observed piece that it even finds time to flesh out Alice’s daughters. In the beginning, Anna is the favoured, successful child while Lydia is the disappointment floundering in a go-nowhere acting career out in Los Angeles. But once Alice’s condition is spotted, the two daughters respond in different ways and for very specific, understandable reasons. With nuance, Bosworth and Stewart both play women who seem to have been profoundly shaped by their impressive mother, and we feel the characters’ confusion at having her influence suddenly ripped away from them. (Stewart especially shines, initially playing a prototypical starving-artist type who surprises her family by her response to Alice’s diagnosis.)

As for Moore, this is one of her most complete, layered performances. Almost 20 years ago, she starred in filmmaker Todd Haynes’ Safe, a revelatory social parable-cum-psychological horror movie about a housewife seemingly allergic to the entire world. The more realistic Still Alice finds her again felled by an invisible malady — one just as frightening — and it’s interesting to note her ability in both films to elicit our sympathy so easily. Expertly modulating her facial expressions as Alice becomes more childlike as her disease advances, Moore externalises the character’s anger and fear, the sense that she can feel her mind going but can’t reverse the damage. But at the same time, it’s not an overly showy performance: There aren’t a lot of for-you-consideration grand dramatic scenes, a modesty that makes Alice’s slow descent all the more painful and human.

To be sure, some will find Still Alice too depressing, too mawkish or too insular to embrace. (Because the Howlands are a well-to-do family, it’s inevitable that a criticism levelled against the film will be that it reeks of upper-class privilege.) But such complaints seem petty in the face of such a quiet, absorbing film. Tearjerkers get a bad rap because of how shamelessly manipulative they are, but Still Alice earns its tears by exploring emotional terrain with restraint and insight. This is a movie about a woman with Alzheimer’s, but it’s really about a family reassessing its bonds. And although none of the characters mentions death, this is one of the most poignant movies about mortality in quite a while: The Howlands are grieving for a person who isn’t actually going anywhere, except in all the ways that really count.

Buzzfeed

TORONTO — “I wish I had cancer,” Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) tells her husband John (Alec Baldwin) in the new movie Still Alice, which recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Columbia University linguistic professor just found out she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia that has no cure. The sad irony that she’s spent her career studying and teaching words only to lose nearly all of them is not lost on the audience or on Alice. When someone has cancer, Alice explains, people wear ribbons. But no one does the same when you can’t find the words to make small talk, or any talk at all.

Still Alice, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who also wrote the screenplay from Lisa Genova’s novel, documents just that — the progression of an early onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis from discovery to nearly complete incoherence. The film opens with Alice’s 50th birthday party where her husband John, son Tom (Hunter Parrish), and older daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth) are having dinner to celebrate. At one point, Anna complains to her husband Charlie (Shane McRae) that her younger sister Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is selfish for not having flown to the East Coast from her home in Los Angeles to join them. As Anna talks about her strained relationship with her sister, Alice interjects, as if to correct her: “My sister and I were very close.” Anna and Charlie clarify that they were speaking about Anna and Lydia’s relationship, not Alice’s with her late sister. And just like that, the moment is over.

There are a few similar instances in the beginning of the film, subtle hints dropped here and there that are so small, the audience might miss them. But that’s the point. Alzheimer’s, at first, affects moments so irrelevant to everyday life that no one would stop to question the misunderstanding. But then, as if overnight, Alice’s symptoms become more apparent. And once her diagnosis is confirmed, her mental deterioration is accelerated.

Still Alice is a difficult film to watch. Seeing Alice’s loving husband and three children care for her is incredibly distressing, and the moments in which she doesn’t recognize her own daughter is downright heartbreaking. But what is most painful are the scenes in which the viewer feels the effects of the disease from Alice’s perspective. As her condition worsens, this story is told in a way in which the audience essentially experiences Alice’s surroundings as much (or as little) as she does, only gaining a few additional pieces of information beyond what Alice sees, knows, and understands.

And because of the way the story is told, viewers experience the disorientation and isolation that come with Alzheimer’s. There is no sense of how much time has passed for Alice or the viewer. In one scene, she comments on how something happened the night before and John is heard whispering that the event actually occurred a month prior. When Alice loses focus on the world around her, so does the frame in which moviegoers see it. While films have tackled Alzheimer’s before, it’s unique and poignantly harrowing to experience the effects of the disease through the victim’s eyes as Still Alice manages to achieve.

Refinedgeekery

Still Alice is an absolutely heart-wrenching tale of a film. Based on the 2009 novel by Lisa Genova, Still Alice follow’s Julianne Moore as Alice Howland, a Columbia University professor of linguistics who is diagnosed not long after her 50th birthday with a case of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. What follows is about an hour and a half of coping with the slow degradation of one’s mind in the company of their loving family (a stellar cast that includes Alec Baldwin as her husband, and Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, and Hunter Parrish as their three children). I was lucky enough to see the film as part of the Toronto International Film Festival this year at the beautiful Winter Garden Theatre, and after wiping away the single tear that lingered throughout the entire viewing experience, I thought I would share my thoughts.

First off, this is a beautifully shot film. The directorial couple, husband and husband Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (co-directors of Quinceanera), don’t work to create anything overly flashy, nor do they rest on depressing imagery. There are some visual tricks like out of focus shots or field of view disruptions that add to the internal frenzy Moore’s character was no doubt feeling, yet other than these, what you have are some beautiful static shots that chew scenery like Columbia University’s beautiful campus, or the beach in what I am guessing is the Hamptons. There are also some long running shots where you get to feel the life of New York City, an already chaotic atmosphere only made more so by the knowledge we the audience have of the mental challenges the title character faces.

Yet it is the subtlety of the performances that make this film. Rather than focusing on the outsider’s perspective watching the deterioration of Alice’s mental acuity, we instead follow it from Alice’s point of view. It was important, I imagine, for Genova to make a professor the focal point of the story, someone to whom their brain has been the single most necessary tool in crafting their life to date. Not only that, but she is a professor of linguistics, or more broadly communication and language, two of the more impacted faculties of Alzheimer’s disease. Watching Moore progress from her initial lectures to the shell of who she once was is absolutely heartbreaking. And yet, her determination to hold on as long as possible throughout the film is completely endearing and heart-warming. While the supporting cast is great at everything they do in this film, the whole effort hinges on Moore’s performance and it is one of her strongest to date. You will no doubt see this film making Oscar buzz come this coming holiday season.

This film had deeply touched the Toronto audience, and with the Q&A after the film, you got a sense from all parties involved, the directors, producers, and the stars, that Alzheimer’s disease was something they respected fully and wanted to deliver properly. I think it is safe to say that their goals were achieved with great success as a long standing ovation greeted them all as they walked on and off the stage. This film is a must see.

Telegraph UK


The most intrepid scene in the gorgeous, piercing Still Alice is between Julianne Moore and herself.
The heroine of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel is a linguistics professor, Dr Alice Howland, who must master what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called “the art of losing”. She’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Alice, who has reached the point of forgetting her children’s names and how to spell “October”, finds a video file on her laptop. She’s not meant to be watching it, or not yet: it’s supposed to be the last message she’ll ever see, when her mind has already deteriorated to a point past endurance. The person on the video is her earlier self – an Alice soon after diagnosis, in the controlled infancy of her illness.

On one level, this is a kind of trap Alice has laid, to bring on the end in the kindest way for her family.

But it’s also a missive of caring and love from a person to her future self. Moore delivers it with consoling patience, as if addressing a child, and at the same time listens, with a trusting smile of befuddled self-recognition.

It’s perhaps the centrepiece moment of an astonishingly delicate and sad performance. To Moore’s precious gallery of portraits – the ailing, lost Carol White of Safe (1995), the strung-out Amber Waves of Boogie Nights (1997), the emotionally imprisoned Cathy Whitaker of Far From Heaven (2002) – Alice Howland must now be added.

Her close-ups are minutely calibrated, even by this actress’s celebrated, unshowy standards. The increments of the performance are tiny marvels. It’s these that make the precipitous then-and-now of this iBook face-off shattering to behold.

The film follows a very straight trajectory into this cruellest of all neurological disorders – rendered especially cruel when Alice, who has three children, finds out she has a rare, hereditary kind. There’s no messing around with fragmentary form, or the memory-as-puzzle-box gimmicks of which cinema can be over-fond, save for a few flickers of childhood home video footage on the beach.
Despite an overly insistent chamber-led score, it’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

The bristling impatience of Alec Baldwin’s persona is ideally harnessed as John, Alice’s husband, whose scoffing denial of her initial diagnosis elicits lightning rage from his wife – she’s used to him not listening. Kate Bosworth, as their tightly-wound eldest daughter, and Kristen Stewart, as her sister, do lovely, complementary work.

Beyond memory loss, it’s a film whose subject is words – their meaning and function, everything they helplessly give away about the brain and its rebellions. The first one Alice forgets, at a lecture podium, is “lexicon”. She goes from a 66-point Words With Friends score, with a well-placed HADJ, to a shadow of the player she used to be, laying down TONE for a mere 6.

She tests herself, at first, chalking “cathode”, “pomegranate”, “trellis” on the kitchen board, and setting a timer to see if she can recall them. When Lydia, months later, recites passages from Angels in America to her mother, they have become mere sounds, but she’s still able to recognise them as sounds conveying something to do with love.

Directing here, and doing their best work ever, is the married team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, for whom this project is especially personal: Glatzer suffers from a related neurodegenerative ailment, ALS, and was unable to come to this Toronto premiere.

Their film will mean a lot to a lot of people – not just anyone whose life Alzheimer’s has affected, but anyone whom it could affect, ever. Working with the magisterial French cameraman Denis Lenoir (Carlos), they get every shot to take its still, measured toll.

Photo Credit: HitFixGregory

@HitFixGregory

What a year for Julianne Moore. Wonderful performance in Still Alice. #TIFF

Standing ovation for Julianne Moore and Still Alice. # tiff 

And yes another classy addition to Kristen Stewarts resume. #StillAlice #TIFF

@larry411  #StillAlice such a powerfully emotional, moving film. This was 1st screening... In fact it was just completed 2 weeks ago #TIFF14

@richardjmunday Still Alice was fantastic, thought provoking and tragic, the performance by @_juliannemoore showcased the insidious nature of this disease.

@weimermat Still Alice was fantastic and powerful.  So powerful that I left the theatre with a strong desire to learn more about the disease.

@WeLiveFilm #StillAlice is a brutally honest look at alzheimer's. The direction was spectacular as was #juliannemoore #KristenStewart #alecbaldwin

@melsil If @Variety is right about the lack of best actress contenders, then someone should jump on Still Alice cause Julianne Moore was amazing.

Photo Credit: carin_moffat

@carin_moffat @_juliannemoore #oscar nom with her brilliant & heartbreaking performance #StillAlice. Incredible #canadatiff14 

@YvonneBoomer Standing o for Julianne Moore at Still Alice premiere #tiff14. Wonderful film, and an emotional experience.

@AmmmieM Early-onset Alzheimer's Day continues. Still Alice was a beautiful, heartfelt, realistic portrayal on film. @TIFF_NET #TIFF14 #StillAlice

@RogueDior

Julianne did a great job. #StillAlice
Julianne really brought the role and the book to life #stillalice #TIFF2014
I liked Kristen's role. I loved the whole cast actually #stillalice #TIFF14
#StillAlice was heartbreaking and good. Made me even cry. #TIFF2014

@JazzBeeP Still Alice has to be the most touching film that I have seen so far this year at #tiff loved it.

@debsterbread Julianne Moore's portrayal of Alice in #StillAlice deserves and oscar nomination. Absolutely heartbreaking. #TIFF14

Photo Credit: Leaf_Chick

@leaf_chick

#StillAlice powerful movie... Great performance by #juliannemoore #KristenStewart #AlecBaldwin #KateBosworth... A must see film!! #TIFF14

Oscar worthy performance by #juliannemoore in #StillAlice...You feel Alice's pain, her fears and her strength... Such a powerful performance

Standing ovation after the screening of #StillAlice at #TIFF14 ... #juliannemoore so moving.... Oscar worthy.

@devyanisaltzman A most incredible performance, and a beautiful film. Julianne Moore in 'Still Alice' #TIFF14

@_marzipancakes Still Alice. Beautiful production and a captivating Julianne Moore. Captures the intensity of the loss of "you" #TIFF14 #thefeels

Photo Credit: corihalpern

@corihalpern Incredible performance by @_juliannemoore in #StillAlice Not a dry eye in the house. She was brilliant. #TIFF14

Reviews & reactions from the screenings of 'Still Alice' on 9 September:

Photo Credit: MichaelFil

(Q&A after the September 9 screening)

@jasonwhyte STILL ALICE a very beautiful story of a woman's realization of Alzheimer's. Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart are outstanding.

@emilyorley Moore carefully shows the quick & harrowing parts of Alzheimer's. Stewart demonstrates the most beautiful & patient love #StillAlice #TIFF14

@Rubenfilm I just lost my mind watching Julianne Moore-Alzheimer-movie Still Alice. So briljant, I wanted it to stop. #oscarmaterial #TIFF14

@misterpatches STILL ALICE is beautiful. Julianne Moore's Amour. Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart & Kate Bosworth are perfectly complimentary. Floored. #TIFF

@MichaelFil Just saw screening of Still Alice at #TIFF14; still crying. @_juliannemoore, your performance broke my heart.

@bfg85 #StillAlice is heartbreaking -- @_juliannemoore is genuine, human, brilliant and Kristen Stewart does quite a nice job also #TIFF14

@stevepond Could not find 2 more wildly different movies than Maps to the Stars & Still Alice, but Julianne Moore & Kristen Stewart are great in both.

@MikeCrisolago Wow, #StillAlice starring @_juliannemoore at #TIFF14. Beautiful. See this film, and bring some tissues when you do @Zoomer

@MBartyzel STILL ALICE: Julianne Moore is wonderful and heartbreaking as a woman with Alzheimer's, reminiscent of her career breakout in SAFE #TIFF14

We will keep this post updated with reviews from the press screenings and other public screenings at TIFF here.