Rating: 3 of 6

Alice Howland , 50, has everything . She is famous linguistics professor at Columbia University in New York, mother of three grown-up children happy and married to an equally successful colleague. The couple lives in jogging distance from campus and has holiday by the sea. The only thing possibly missing is life after law, grandchildren.

So begins Alice dropping words. After she ran astray during a run, she goes to a neurologist as soon sets the terrible diagnosis of presenile Alzheimer’s disease. Alice is no longer in the midst of life, disease coils time forward faster than what someone is prepared, least of all herself. The irony and tragedy is of course in a past so razor sharp mind suddenly fails and shuts down.

Because everyone involved handles situation admirably quiet, it is rather small abysses that are regularly open to account for the dramatic and may the tying in the stomach. Like when the family realizes that Alice forgotten that it is his own daughter, she is talking with. Or when one day she can not find the door to his private bathroom and wet themselves. Julianne Moore has been deserving of an Oscar for several of its former principal roles too, but she portrays undeniably Alice’s slow walking into the fog in a sovereign manner.

The sequence in the film is, inevitably, as predictable as that of an incurable ailment. It does not prevent “Still Alice” by Lisa Genova’s best-selling novel, is touching. But the portrayal of the successful family, which continues to be about as smooth as before the disaster struck, combined with sentimental sound design with strings and many pictures of autumn leaves and waves lapping on the beach, also get the film to resemble a well produced but conventional television drama.

Kristen Stewart, who plays youngest daughter, is the gravel in the otherwise too well-oiled machinery. I yearn to see even her starring role in a well-written soon.