One of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.

For a movie about the importance of memory, Away From Her is appropriately sophisticated in its treatment of time. Polley has broken the chronological story into three sections of unequal length and woven them together, approximating our own mercurial journeys through the past.

To say it is about a debilitating disease is as reductive as saying "Little Miss Sunshine" is about a beauty pageant. Both are intimate stories of family ties that bind but sometimes also choke.

Extraordinary--delicate, seriously disturbing, and lovely.

Anyone who could read Munro's original story and think they could make a film of it, and then make a great film, deserves a certain awe.

The movie, Polley's feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.

For anyone who grew up worshiping at the shrine of Julie Christie, the notion that she could be playing a white-haired woman drifting into senility is a jolt to the system. But her radiance, beauty and talent are undiminished: she's hauntingly, heartbreakingly good.

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.

Poignant, wise and unafraid -- just the sort of film for a young person, or any person, for that matter, to make.

I can't remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.

A phantom of a movie whose beautiful flakes fall into the deep crevices of memory long after the seasons change.

With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.

As this intimate, beautifully observed film unfolds, you realize that the story's themes -- the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships and the ways in which we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences -- are relevant no matter what age you happen to be.