The story of a ground-breaking author

Keira Knightley plays the title character in Colette, a movie that's as much period piece as character study.

Colette, the French novelist, died in 1954 at the age of 81. The movie Colette focuses on roughly a quarter of Colette's fascinating life, notably the years she spent with her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, a man who published under the name Willy. Colette wrote the famous Claudine novels, but Willy took credit for them.

A bon vivant, literary entrepreneur and music critic, Willy hired others to author books to which he proudly put his name. His major talent seems to have been for promotion, which suggests that he may have been born a century too soon.

Colette, who was 14 years younger than Willy, eventually divorced him. She went on to have a distinguished literary career, as well as a personal life that included two additional marriages and various relationships with women.

Director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) uses a portion of Colette's life to make a stylistically conventional movie about an unconventional woman.

As far as it goes, Colette proves enjoyable with Keira Knightley bringing a sense of fiber and substance to the role of Colette and Dominic West immersing himself in a convincing turn as man who relied on preening charm, profligate spending, and a charismatic personality.

Westmoreland doesn't shortchange Colette's adventurous sex life, presenting one episode in which Colette has an affair with an American woman who's visiting Paris (Eleanor Tomlinson). So, by the way, does Willy. Colette also establishes an on-going relationship with Mathilde de Morny (Denise Gough), an aristocrat and gender rebel who shocked polite society by dressing like a man.

Colette and Willy tolerated each other's sexual digressions; according to the movie, Colette prized honesty more than she valued fidelity. Willy agrees, but he’s not quite up Colette’s demanding standard.

Part tale of feminist assertion and part portrait of turn-of-the-century Paris, Colette engages without generating sustained excitement for a title character whose sharp edges have been buffed into submission by what may be a little too much production value.

Colette likely will be appreciated more as carefully appointed, nicely acted period piece than a provocative look at a woman who didn't so much challenge norms as bypass them with blithe indifference.

Put another way, Colette presents its subject with honesty but never throws down the gauntlet of challenge that would have pushed audiences out of their comfort zones, something Colette deserved.

Julianne Moore's devastating 'Still Alice'

A brilliant professor tries to cope with an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Julianne Moore is on track to win a best-actress Oscar for her heartbreaking performance in Still Alice, the story of a Columbia University linguistics professor who's diagnosed with Alzheimer's and finds herself slipping into the fog of vanishing memory.

If you're of a certain age, it will be impossible to watch Still Alice without wondering about those little lapses of memory you may from time-to-time experience, moments of disorientation when you walk into a room and have forgotten exactly what brought you there or the frustration of having to dig through mental files to remember the name of someone you know quite well.

Confusion falling across her face like a sudden shadow, Moore evokes the pain of early-onset Alzheimer's; i.e., the prospect of losing everything that her character regards as vital to her identity.

Even worse, the character Moore's playing -- Alice Howland -- is only 50 when she's diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's that's genetic in origin.

To their credit, directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have not made a disease-of-the-week weepie. They resist any temptation to garnish the story with sentiment, and they bring Alice's family dynamics into play in the movie's background.

Alice's husband (Alec Baldwin) also works at Columbia, where he's a biological researcher. The couple have a son (Hunter Parrish) who's attending medical school and two grown daughters (Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart).

The Howland offspring must work through their relationships with their mother. They also must decide whether to be tested to determine if any of them has inherited the genetic time bomb that eventually will result in the disease.

The movie's key relationship involves Alice and her youngest daughter (Stewart), a young woman who has moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress. Alice long has wanted Stewart's Lydia to attend college, perhaps to enhance the intellectual luster of what appears to be an exceptionally accomplished family.

As developed throughout the movie, the relationship between Lydia and Alice proves honest and touching. Stewart -- who has taken more than a few lumps for her work as Bella Swan in the Twilight movies -- holds her own as a character trying to chart a path in life while dealing sensitively with her mother's decline.

None of the issues raised by Still Alice are treated melodramatically. They unfold in the quiet, respectful style such a movie demands.

Glatzer and Westmoreland aren't interested in vilifying anyone. They respect their characters, paying some attention to the frustrations and needs of each. Only the son is somewhat neglected.

Still, this is Moore's movie -- and she rises to the occasion.

Without underling or italicizing anything, Moore conveys every bit of the torment experienced by a brilliant woman who's losing her grip. Alice gets lost in the middle of lectures, forgets where she is while jogging and experiences even worse indignities as the disease progresses. She's watching her life be erased.

You may have read that Glatzer insisted on continuing with the movie, even after being diagnosed with ALS. He obviously was able to bring heightened identification to the project, but in their adaptation of a novel by Lisa Genova, Glatzer and Westmoreland avoid sledgehammer emotional effects. Alzheimer's is frightening enough on its own.

This is not to say that Still Alice has been turned into an Alzheimer's horror show. Still Alice takes a well-observed look at the transformation wrought by a terrible disease.

At one point, Alice says that she'd trade her Alzheimer's for cancer. It's to both Moore's and the movie's credit, that we understand exactly what she means. She knows that she's saying goodbye to herself. It's like dying without actually being dead.