Julia Roberts’ turn as Barbara Weston is less a performance than a reckoning. She abandons the glossy rom-com aura that made her a star and steps into a woman who is exhausted, furious, and still somehow holding the center of a collapsing family. Opposite Meryl Streep’s venom-laced Violet, Roberts channels a lifetime of unspoken hurt into sharp, trembling confrontations that feel dangerously intimate. Her face, stripped of Hollywood polish, becomes a battlefield of twitching restraint and sudden, volcanic outbursts.
What makes this work unforgettable is its refusal to flatter anyone, least of all its lead. Roberts lets Barbara be petty, cruel, desperate, and unbearably tender, sometimes in the same breath. You see the toll of decades in every slumped shoulder and bitten-back apology. By the final scenes, you’re not admiring a movie star’s range; you’re watching a woman lose, then salvage, the last scraps of herself. It’s messy, unvarnished, and quietly devastating—proof that beneath the legend is an artist still willing to bleed for the truth