Away From Her (12A)

Julie Christie has her first starring role for 10 years in Away From Her (12A, 110 mins), playing a woman relishing the autumn of her life in a wintery small Canadian town. She has the same easy intimacy with her co-star Gordon Pinsent as she did with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, and a simple shot in which he watches her fix her hair, or in which she rests her head against him while he reads aloud, tells us almost everything we need to know about their characters' 50-year marriage. A marriage that is traumatically dissolved, along with her memory of it, after her Alzheimer's forces her to move to a nursing home.

Adapted from an Alice Munro short story by the young Canadian Sarah Polley, this is a study of love and grief in which each line is well-crafted, but the actors' gestures and careworn faces say even more. Polley was previously best known for starring in the 1994 Dawn of the Dead remake, which seems far removed from the adult, still and quietly forceful film that is her directorial debut. But the slow pans around the nursing home, in which semi-sentient people re-enact a cruel parody of their former lives, are infused with as much sadness and horror at the human condition as any shot in a George Romero movie.

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