Still Alice review: you can see why Julianne Moore won an Oscar but the film’s still boring

There’s always seemed something masklike about Julianne Moore’s face: she seems walled in by her beauty. When she smiles, the only thing that moves is her mouth; that superb fenderwork of bone remains as impassive as a sphinx. This very inexpressiveness gives her an air of trapped intelligence, which she used to great effect in the early part of her career playing a string of numbed-out beauties— her coked-up porn actress in Boogie Nights; her neurasthenic housewives in Safe and Far from Heaven, all dying behind the eyes. More recently, she has cut loose to channel something of Diane Keaton’s scatterbrained comedy in The Kids Are All Right, in which her performance was a revelation: Moore has never been so loose or so funny. In Still Alice, she plays a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s and you can see why they gave her an Oscar for it. It’s like watching a career retrospective only in reverse: come see the more radiant, vivacious Julianne Moore regress into one of her early pathos-of-emptiness roles.