Cometh the hour, cometh the movie. The silent era made dramatic mileage from ailments that modern antibiotics would despatch. Garbo’s Camille was not the only 1930s screen heroine to succumb to a mycobacterium. By the 1940s and 1950s, film often deals with disfigurement (all those returning servicemen) as well as mental disorder. And we in the twenty-first century now have the ailments of the demographic bulge to contend with, including dementia. Still Alice is concerned with a specific set of circumstances that seems weighted for maximum irony. Alice (Julianne Moore), a professor of linguistics who has just celebrated her fiftieth birthday, begins to lose something of her special facility with language. It’s just the odd word at first, followed by the occasional confusion, wh