Swinton plays a former war correspondent battling cancer, and Julianne Moore is the old friend who helps her make a fateful choice.

By Owen Gleiberman

Characters die every day in movies. Whether you’re watching a violent thriller or a deathbed tearjerker like “Steel Magnolias” or one of Ingmar Bergman’s more macabre meditations, you could say that the movies are, in a grand collective way, nothing less than a dress rehearsal for death. And yet it’s still rare to come across a big screen drama that grabs death by the horns, looks it in the eye, asks us to confront its dire reality on every level, as Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving “The Room Next Door” does.

The film is fairly straightforward in form. It’s about two women, both in their early 60s, who have been friends for a long time but haven’t seen each other in years: Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an art writer in New York City, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war correspondent for the New York Times who travels the world, with whom Ingrid reconnects when she learns that Martha is in the hospital battling cancer. Her illness is serious: it’s stage three cervical cancer, and she’s undergoing a highly experimental immunotherapy treatment, which is the only chance she has. (In other words, not much.)