STILL ALICE (12A, 101 mins)

Directors: Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer

4 stars

Julianne Moore finally picked up an Oscar last month at her fifth attempt for her compelling and perfectly judged performance as a woman who discovers she is suffering from early onset Alzheimer's Disease.

At the age of 50, Moore's Alice Howland is at the peak of her success as an esteemed professor of linguistics. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) is loving and their comfortably well-off family life couldn't be better.

But Alice goes to see a doctor when she starts to notice changes in her behaviour, and gets the devastating news that once the proper tests are done, there's a good chance she has Alzheimer's.

We're taken through short, neatly encapsulated scenes that show us in increments how Alice is being affected by the condition. At first this consists of forgetting a word here and there or getting slightly confused in an everyday situation. But soon the symptoms become more pronounced, like when she gets lost while out running, while it also starts to impact her ability to teach.

For once in a film about someone struggling to overcome a potentially debilitating affliction, it's not necessarily the flashy stuff that gets Moore noticed here. Everything about the film and the performance is very precise and measured, from when she first gets warnings of the likely diagnosis to further indignities.

Watching Alice slowly deteriorate is quietly but powerfully heartbreaking, made more so by how unobtrusively it's handled.

There's no attempt at manipulative operatics, with everything instead shown through the frustration and fear in her eyes and her face, and as a result so much more impactful than a bog-standard disease of the week movie.

Complicating things even more is that Alice has a rare genetic form of the disease which means it has a good chance of being passed on to her grown-up children, with some of the most poignant and perceptive moments coming from their reactions.

Alice has a difficult relationship with her youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), whom she thinks is wasting her time pursuing an acting career rather than going to college.

These interactions are strong enough to begin with, but the way the situations are handled and how they come to be led and defined by the disease adds another layer of potency.

Though there may not be much to the film beyond Alice and her family trying to cope with Alzheimer's, this is still a fully-rounded drama, and if it doesn't end in a particularly satisfying way, that's only because there aren't really very many places it realistically could go. See it then for the subtlety of its construction and for a Hollywood great getting the recognition she's been due for many years.

See it if you liked: Away From Her, Iris, Cake

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR (15, 86 mins)

Director: Desiree Akhavan

4 stars

Desiree Akhavan makes a huge splash with her first film as writer-director with this insightful comedy drama.

She also stars as Shirin, a young Brooklyn woman from an Iranian family who just had a bad break-up with her girlfriend, with the criss-crossing narrative showing the ups and downs of their year-long relationship alongside Shirin in the present trying to cope with the aftermath.

There's a splash of Lena Dunham's Girls in it if you're looking for a reference point, but mostly this is very much its own beast.

So many aspects of it work, from the characters and their interactions and relationships, to the family stuff that takes a wry look into Iranian culture and customs.

Most of all though it is frequently and effortlessly laugh-out-loud hilarious, and not many romantic comedies these days can claim that. And in Desiree Akhavan, a star has been born.

See it if you liked: Obvious Child, In a World, Concussion

HYENA (18, 112 mins)

Director: Gerard Johnson

2 stars

A crooked cop (Peter Ferdinando) gets caught in the middle of a turf war between Turkish and Albanian drug lords in London in this grim and unpleasant thriller, a by-the-numbers tale that never grabs like it ought to.

There are many elements that are familiar from similarly themed American movies, but though a certain atmosphere of seediness is created, it doesn't feel as cinematic as it should, partly because many scenes seem to be going for a Ben Wheatley vibe to their naturalism which ends up being slightly at odds with the sprawling canvas of corruption and trafficking. The main issue though is that with such a blurring of the lines between the bad guys and the supposed good guys, there's very little reason to care about any of them.

See it if you liked: All Things to All Men, Bad Lieutenant, The Sweeney

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD (15, 91 mins)

Director: Gregg Araki

3 stars

This 80s-set melodrama charts the problems of teenager Kat (Shailene Woodley), whose unhappy life gets even more complicated when her emotionally unstable mother (Eva Green) disappears without warning or trace.

It's probably cult director Greg Araki's most accessible film, but that's mainly because most of his previous films have been too wilfully odd for the mainstream.

This is still pretty out there some of the time, and it's the stylish way it's put together that makes it generally entertaining if thoroughly potty. But there doesn't really seem to be a lot going on beyond the central mystery and Kat isn't an especially compelling character.

Still, Woodley continues to impress following The Fault in Our Stars and Green's over the top shenanigans will either grow tiresome and unbalance the film, or she's so demented that her performance will make it for you.

See it if you liked: Kaboom, Mysterious Skin, Heathers