From Entertainment Weekly and Cnn Showbiz Today:

It's no small compliment to say that Julianne Moore could speak in tongues and nobody would make a big deal of her dialect. In one exceptional year, the 38-year-old played a Mississippi gold digger in ''Cookie's Fortune,'' a conniving British lady in ''An Ideal Husband,'' a California trophy wife in ''Magnolia,'' and a grief-stricken suburbanite in ''A Map of the World.'' Yet in each film, she melted so completely into character that the only identifiable link was Moore's amber hair framing a white-lace complexion. The former Army brat is an artist of unusually supple range, but she was never more transformed than in ''The End of the Affair,'' Neil Jordan's astutely controlled adaptation of Graham Greene's novel. (Her Golden Globe nods earlier this year cited her work both in this film and ''An Ideal Husband.'')

As Sarah Miles, an adulterous Englishwoman in wartime London who sacrifices sexual passion for spiritual love, Moore behaves in considerate ways with Stephen Rea as her colorless civil-servant husband to whom she is committed in matrimony. But with an inflamed Ralph Fiennes as her novelist lover to whom she is committed in body and soul, the actress alternately burns and glows, perfectly balancing erotic fever, religious fervor, and tea-steeped decency. Moore's approach is precise, quiet, never asking us to admire the technique behind the effect. (Hers is an English accent that doesn't bring to mind Meryl Streep or Gwyneth Paltrow. Well, until now.)

She needn't raise her voice or fling her hands to DO characters; she BECOMES them. And quickly. ''If I don't get it early on, I'm usually going to have trouble,'' she says. And her artlessness -- so rare in screen acting these days -- is all the more tantalizing for the natural gravity with which she dusts her work. That calmness settles fine as translucent powder, reflecting light. - Lisa Schwarzbaum

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It's no small compliment to say that Julianne Moore could speak in tongues and nobody would make a big deal of her dialect. In one exceptional year, the 38-year-old played a Mississippi gold digger in ''Cookie's Fortune,'' a conniving British lady in ''An Ideal Husband,'' a California trophy wife in ''Magnolia,'' and a grief-stricken suburbanite in ''A Map of the World.'' Yet in each film, she melted so completely into character that the only identifiable link was Moore's amber hair framing a white-lace complexion. The former Army brat is an artist of unusually supple range, but she was never more transformed than in ''The End of the Affair,'' Neil Jordan's astutely controlled adaptation of Graham Greene's novel. (Her Golden Globe nods earlier this year cited her work both in this film and ''An Ideal Husband.'')
As Sarah Miles, an adulterous Englishwoman in wartime London who sacrifices sexual passion for spiritual love, Moore behaves in considerate ways with Stephen Rea as her colorless civil-servant husband to whom she is committed in matrimony. But with an inflamed Ralph Fiennes as her novelist lover to whom she is committed in body and soul, the actress alternately burns and glows, perfectly balancing erotic fever, religious fervor, and tea-steeped decency. Moore's approach is precise, quiet, never asking us to admire the technique behind the effect. (Hers is an English accent that doesn't bring to mind Meryl Streep or Gwyneth Paltrow. Well, until now.)
She needn't raise her voice or fling her hands to DO characters; she BECOMES them. And quickly. ''If I don't get it early on, I'm usually going to have trouble,'' she says. And her artlessness -- so rare in screen acting these days -- is all the more tantalizing for the natural gravity with which she dusts her work. That calmness settles fine as translucent powder, reflecting light. - Lisa Schwarzbaum