Judy

British director Rupert Goold's Judy depicts an iconic figure, Judy Garland, near the end of a life that's been addled by a drug addiction spawned by a merciless motion picture studio system when she was a teenager. Renee Zellwegger, stripped of her cherubic girlishness, is a gaunt and enervated Garland, kept alive by booze and pills and love for her children, performing a series of concerts in London just months before her death at 47. Though the script by Tom Edge has moments of near campy hysterics, it also has some lovely, quieter moments that resonate. Judy's evening with a gay couple (Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira) is respite from the grind of performance, isolation and insomnia. She enjoys a meal and a moment of genuine connectedness. It's a passage of warmth in the film to counterbalance the alienation the character has felt most of her life. The film's unevenness in tone will keep it out of the running for Best Picture but Zellwegger's total encasement in the body of an abundantly talented and tremendously tragic woman will most assuredly get a nod.