The Role Turning Heads This Season, Straight From a Community Theater Stage

Julianne Moore has taken on a part built for full transformation: a suburban housewife who loses herself entirely in her town's amateur theater productions. The new film "The Debut" required her to sing for the role, a challenge she took on alongside director Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg has described the resulting performance in two words that matter more than most reviews: "so good" and "so weird." For an audience that knows the difference between a competent performance and a genuinely strange, committed one, that is the kind of endorsement worth noting.

With reporting from Vanity Fair.