18Sep
Advanced Style
Advanced Style is a documentary, released 6 years after Ari Seth Cohen, an urban photographer, started a blog by the same name at just 26 years old.
Age Acceptance
Click on any title or image to read full review
03Sep
The Prospector
The Prospector is a beautifully photographed, novel, and instructive visit with Ernie Laszlo, an older resident of the historic California gold country in Mariposa, California.
03Sep
Age of Adaline
Age of Adaline is a well-crafted film that presents viewers with a fantasy that many entertain—living without aging.
19Oct
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
With an acerbic script by British writer Katy Brand and Australian director Sophie Hyde at the helm, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande has a modest premise.
15Jun
Inga
Inga opens and ends with two major entries (Kapitels or “chapters”) she writes in her journal. The first and briefer is “Love.” In her poetic vocal narrative, she offers her views of love’s evolving meanings and changing phases across the life span.
18Apr
Love Limits
Love Limits is a transcendent film about the unique loving relationship shared by Cory Ann Rudy, age 36, and Warren Barrow, age 83. In addition to the difference in their ages, they differ in other significant ways. Cory is a White woman from a farm in upstate New York; Warren is an African-American man from Brooklyn.
20Sep
Go Gentle
In Go Gentle, the scope through which we view time is entirely different from that presented in Recorder. Ninety-year-old Shirley Rosenthal talks openly and calmly about accepting the end of her life.
11Dec
Dick Johnson is Dead
Rarely have I seen a film that looks at our human mortality as creatively and playfully as this one does. Before you turn away from reading any further about a subject so off-putting as death, let me say: See this film! It is not what you think it will be. I was avoiding even considering this film to review or see; the brief descriptions of it made it sound too grotesque.
11Dec
Lolly Font, Yoga Rebel
Good things come in small packages—and brief ones as well. Though a short film, Lolly Font: Yoga Rebel has strong relevance for gerontological theorists, researchers, and educators, particularly those interested in the evolving meanings of successful aging. Director Liz Cane introduces us to 84-year-old Lolly Font, a yoga teacher nearing the end of her instructional career.
31Jan
Coming of Age in Aging America
Coming of Age in Aging America is perhaps the most important film to emerge to date within The New Gerontology paradigm. In contrast to the historically dour 4-D perspective on aging (decline, deterioration, dependency, depression), it is refreshingly optimistic and celebratory.
11Oct
Grow Old Along with Me: The Poetry of Aging – Part 2
Few poets celebrate aging as exuberantly as Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” Browning’s optimistic sentiments are purposefully embodied in the title and content of this lovely film produced by videographers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele.
11Jul
Grow Old Along With Me: The Poetry of Aging, Part 1
The prime motive behind this important and revealing video was the desire of filmmakers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele “to make a positive contribution to the issue of aging by finding wise and vital elders who would guide us through the process” (Anne Macksoud, Personal Communication, June 14, 2019).
05Feb
Still Mine (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)
We started slow with Still Mine, a sweet and sad true tale of the losses a couple experienced as the wife begins a slow decline into dementia.
05Feb
Still Mine
One such new film, Still Mine, takes us into the lives of Craig and Irene Morrison as they face the gradual loss of Irene’s short-term memory (the comments that follow are elaborated from a review I did of this film for Itineraries, an online publication of Second Journey; Vanden Bosch, 2013b).
07Dec
What Time is Left
As young videographer Dakin Henderson (What Time Is Left) drives to a family meeting to discuss his Grandmother Deedee’s desire for a living will, he sings a lament: “And I’m young and stupid. Oh to be old and wise, to be comfortable with the process of my own demise.” The lyric accurately captures the common theme of these two films—the life-long, continuous attempts that people make to come to terms with the meanings of aging and of death. Both films were motivated by different yet personally relevant death experiences.