It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.

All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.

Julie Christie gives a fabulous performance of mysterious, unclear depth as Fiona.

Polley captures the brisk, cheerful fascism of nursing-home existence with merciless clarity; if you've visited a parent or grandparent in one of those places, you may want to laugh and cry in the same moment.

The pain of watching a spouse succumb to Alzheimer's is given a particularly deep and sensitive treatment in Away From Her.

What Away From Her achieves is quite admirable-- a low-key, intelligent setting for performances marked by those same qualities.

Away From Her is a twilight-of-life love story, one that harshly demolishes our romantic notions of love and loyalty, then replaces them with something deeper and, finally, more consoling.

Munro's stark lily needed none of this gilding.

It's Sarah Polley through and through: slightly too glum for its own good, but reeking of quality and feeling.