In Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays a poised academic whose life is turned upside down when she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. The film revolves around the figure of Alice and her gradual descent, and Moore brings her to life with a beautifully balanced combination of strength, vulnerability and intelligence.

Alice's area is linguistics, and it's in the course of her work that she first notices that her grasp on language is slipping. There are moments of blankness, a disconcerting instance when does not know where she is. She recognises that something is wrong, and seeks out an answer.

Following the diagnosis, Alice is acute and resourceful, and she uses her ingenuity to devise strategies of various kinds. Some are coping mechanisms for the present, one is an elaborate scheme involving a filmed message addressed to her future self. She pays a visit to a care facility, under the pretence of inquiring on behalf of an elderly relative, to establish what she faces; this quietly unsettling scene exemplifies the best aspects of the restrained approach that co-writers and directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland adopt.

Alice's material situation is comfortable; the film does not establish a context in which to explore the financial challenges that caring for someone with Alzheimer's may involve. She's a member of an overachieving family of doctors and lawyers; her husband (Alec Baldwin), is loving and supportive, but he's also focused on his career opportunities. Her youngest child, Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is the odd one out. She's trying to follow an acting career, rather than going to college, and Alice has trouble acknowledging her dedication, or her need to make her own way on her own terms. Yet in the end, Lydia's choices allow her to be a closer observer and carer as Alice's life begins to unravel in ways that she cannot have anticipated.  Stewart gives a fine supporting performance that dovetails well with Moore's.

Glatzer and Westmoreland handle the course of Alice's decline with some delicacy. There's nothing as confronting in the way they depict loss of physical control as there was, for example, in Richard Eyre's Iris (2001), in which Judi Dench played the writer Iris Murdoch caught up in the toils of Alzheimer's.

They introduce the topic of genetic testing for Alice's other family members, given that her condition is hereditary, but let this element slip by, dramatically speaking, without exploring how confronting it can be for those involved. But it's a poignant, considered film about a devastating subject. It's not surprising that Moore has swept all before her in the awards season, and that an Oscar win now seems inevitable. Her performance is judicious as well as haunting.