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All Film Reviews

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31Jul

Breaking the Silence: The Fear of Retaliation

Much of life in long-term care homes unfolds through ordinary moments. A resident presses a call light and waits. Someone requests assistance getting dressed. A concern is raised about a medication, a meal, or a preference that has gone unnoticed...
14May

Stolen Time

Stolen Time successfully portrays the depth and scope of the human pain and suffering caused by the systemic failure of corporations to provide adequate care in nursing homes.
30Jan

Familiar Touch

When Canadian actor/director Sarah Polley chose an Alice Munro short story about a woman with dementia entering an aged care home as the focus for her first feature film (Far From Her, Polley, 2006), critics remarked that it was unusual—and courageous—subject matter for a young woman making her directorial debut.
30Jan

When Fall is Coming

In a scene towards the end of When Fall Is Coming, one character observes wearily of her son, “he wants to do right, but always does wrong.” It is the perfect summation of the motivations and actions of virtually every character in Francois Ozon’s film.
08Oct

A Kind of Madness

The one-line description of this movie most often used to describe it goes like this: “A 70-year-old man abducts his wife from her retirement home and goes on the run from their adult children.” The trailer for the film dramatically reinforces that description.
08Oct

A Man on the Inside

Creating a documentary that accurately reflects day-to-day life in a residential care facility is nearly impossible. Most eldercare residences have strict policies that prohibit any video recording within the building. In 2019, Chilean filmmaker Maete Alberdi did manage to bring a film crew into an eldercare residence.
11Mar

The Substance

The Substance joins a provocative history of films that have tackled the fate of women as they age in (and out of) the entertainment industry.
11Feb

Thelma

The “elder odyssey” has been described as a long-standing tradition that can be traced throughout cinema history (Shary & McVittie, 2016). This narrative form often combines the “road movie” or journey film with a quest for some kind of resolution or redemption for the aging central protagonist. I
11Oct

Perfect Days

If you have ever wondered if it is possible to make an absorbing 2-hr film where the central protagonist cleans toilets for a living, doesn’t speak for an hour, and not much happens, Perfect Days (Wenders, 2023) answers that question.
10Oct
Figure 1. Jane Curtain, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ben Kingsley, and Jade Quon in Jules.

Jules

Jules is an entertaining and engaging film. It also has, embedded within it, a refreshing regard for human oldness. On the face of it, the film shows the typical societal attitude toward older individuals. Milton and his acquaintances are often ignored or mildly tolerated. However, scattered here and there within the film are little gems of age acceptance.
30Sep

What We Leave Behind

“Grandpa was a mystery to me as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to him. He’d smoke a lot and bring me milk fudge and tamarind candy.”
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.
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

Fast Forward

Preparing for the physical changes that aging will bring is not something most of us think about. Accepting the physical changes that aging will bring is not something most of us want to think about either.
03Sep

I Cannot Tell You How I Feel

There have been scads of documentaries made about the experiences of adult children helping their aging parents make the transition from independent living to accepting various levels of assistance. It’s a universal theme in modern human life. The documentaries range from boring and factual, to intensely and graphically personal. I Cannot Tell You How I Feel takes a different approach—one that is visually engaging and highly entertaining, but skimpy on a coherent storyline.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood