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All Film Reviews

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04Oct

Wrinkles

Life in a long-term care facility is rarely explored in narrative films. A couple of exceptions to this, Quartet and Assisted Living , were recently reviewed in this journal ( Vanden Bosch, 2013 ). This topic remains one of the frontiers we do not enjoy visiting in our culture.
04Aug

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a wonderfully composed film about the reuniting of an older Chinese father with his only daughter after years of continental separation.
29Jun

Mum and me

There has been a modest but notable increase in the number of fiction and nonfiction films addressing the subject of dementia in recent decades. Scottish documentary maker Sue Bourne’s 2008 film, Mum and Me, fits firmly into this burgeoning nonfiction subgenre.
08Feb

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel (Skogland, 2007), based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author, Margaret Laurence, takes us on a life review through the eyes and memories of its main character, 90 year old Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn). Faced with undefined health issues, she fiercely resists the attempts of her son and his wife to move her into a nursing home.
04Feb

My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond

Move back historically to the formal birth and popularization of Rowe and Kahn’s paradigm for successful aging. Move back still farther to the 1970 and 1980 decades where gestational studies show how environmental experiences and lifestyle account for physical and psychological changes once thought due solely to primary aging. Clearly, “successful aging” and its sibs—productive aging, positive aging, and optimal aging—have a rich vertical lineage spanning several generations of researchers.
06Dec

Love Is Strange

Of all the stories we enjoy hearing and seeing in films, stories about love—or the lack of it—seem to be at the top of the list. Try to think for a moment of a film that tells a story without any love-related component.
04Dec

No Age Limit: Creativity and Aging

Old timers in gerontology will remember the challenge of its early days as we tried to convince a doubtful public as well as our skeptical students that human aging had any “up-side” at all. Successful aging was not yet a common part of our vocabulary.
04Oct

Forget Me Not

When I first heard about this feature length documentary, I was prepared to see the same kind of story that has been filmed again and again—the usual angst that is so often presented in documentaries about this painful journey of families dealing with the loss of cognition and then recognition. But after just a few minutes into this family’s story, I sensed that this film would be different.
02Oct

Josef’s Daughter

There is much that is novel about Josef’s Daughter. However, the viewer must be willing to move beyond its now-familiar message that middle aged adults are often confronted with a fresh awareness that aging and death are inexorably linked, that this linkage has undeniable personal relevance for them, and that some of them may have a difficult time coping with the fearsome implications of these facts.
03Aug

Backseat Bingo

For those too young to remember, “Backseat Bingo” is a 1950’s term for light sexual activity (or more) that occurs in the back seat of a vehicle. Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo is a 6-min animated documentary that invites a handful of retired elders to share their personal attitudes and values about sex, romance, and aging.
03Jun

Last Love

When an older man and a younger woman are drawn to each other in a movie, red flags pop up. We expect to go down the typical road of mutual, or perhaps, one-way exploitation in the relationship.
03Jun

The Way We Get By

The Way We Get By offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of three elderly Maine Troop Greeters at the Bangor Airport. Because of its eastern-most location, the Bangor Airport has served as the major departure and arrival point of more than a million U.S. troops involved in the Iraqi and Afghanistan theaters of war.
07Apr

Life According to Sam

This multiple-award winning video provides a smooth flowing, intimate, 2-year portrait of life within a family dealing with Hutchinson–Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), a rare and fatal genetic disorder more commonly referred to as “premature aging syndrome.”
07Apr

Philomena

Back in the mid 50s in Ireland, when she was a teenaged unwed mother to be, Philomena Lee was banished from her family and sent to a convent to have her child. She and the other young women sent there for the same reason were allowed contact with their babies for 1hr a day.
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

Starlet

Starlet is a rich and insightful film that traces the development of an unlikely friendship between two women separated by 64 years of life. Jane (Dree Hemingway), a 21 year old who is adrift and newly finding her way in Los Angeles, first meets Sadie (Besedka Johnson), an 85 year old crusty-tempered widow, at Sadie’s yard sale where Jane buys an old but decorative thermos to use as a flower vase.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood