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All Film Reviews

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08Apr

About Face: Then and Now

About Face: Then and Now is a revealing and realistic film about supermodels. With perfect beauty and smiling countenance, their faces capture would-be readers of the world’s most popular fashion magazines. They stride and slide confidently down fashion runways, expressing haute couture confidence befitting the expensive clothing they model.
08Feb

Alive Inside: The Story of Music and Memory

Alive Inside is an epiphanic film. It demonstrates what happens when Dan Cohen, a social worker in an East Coast nursing home, plays personally tailored music via iPod headsets for older residents diagnosed with dementia and other “imprisoning” disorders. The results are simple and striking. The residents awaken and come alive. They move, sing, and dance.
08Feb

The Iron Lady

A more recent work, The Iron Lady (Lloyd, 2011), is exceptional for its unequivocal first- person focus. Like Iris, this film explores the life of a maverick British female figure. It begins with a seemingly unremarkable scene; an elderly woman purchases milk from an inner London corner shop and returns home to have breakfast with her husband.
08Feb

Fred Won’t Move Out

One of the biggest challenges in creating a narrative film around a character who has dementia is to convincingly portray the effects of that dementia. Dementia is usually not something one can “act” from internal experience. It can only be portrayed by closely observing the wide ranging effects that a cognitive impairment like dementia imposes.
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.
05Dec

Hope Springs

In the film, Hope Springs, Nebraska residents Arnold and Kay have been married for 31 years. Each morning, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) marches into the kitchen, places his suit coat and briefcase on a chair, and is served the same breakfast by Kay (Meryl Streep) which he eats behind the newspaper. Each night he falls asleep in front of an “improving your golf” program on TV and is woken up by Kay, after which they say good night and retire to their separate bedrooms. As trite and stereotypical as these early scenes in the film are, they do quickly establish the context out of which the movie unfolds
14Oct

A Separation

Set in modern-day Tehran, A Separation opens with one long three-and–a-half-minute shot, in which a wife and husband passionately address an unseen (but occasionally heard) judge. At issue is a divorce that the wife wants because her husband will not leave the country with her and their 11-year-old daughter as they had previously agreed to do.
07Oct

Last Will and Embezzlement: Scholastic Edition

At the outset of Last Will and Embezzlement: Scholastic Edition, the narrator states, “Of all of the illicit and illegal enterprises in the world, it is the criminal’s dream. It requires the least amount of risk, requires minimum outlay, can be done right from your living room, and is virtually unreported by its victims.” The “it” he is referring to is elder exploitation or financial abuse.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood