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All Film Reviews

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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.
08Oct

Departures

In Departures, the topic of death is initially objectified and held at a distance. By the end of the film, death has become more personal. Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a young aspiring cellist in Tokyo and is deep in debt from the purchase of a new cello.
07Oct

The Mayor

The Mayor is a film that should be viewed by every serious student of gerontology. In a display of remarkable trust, selected residents of Town Village North, a retirement community in Dallas, TX, share their daily lives—public and private thoughts, feelings, and activities—with brilliant documentarian Jared Scheib. The most intimate focus is placed upon 88-year-old Sam Berger, called “the Mayor” by other residents because of his irrepressible social largess.
07Oct

The Genius of Marian

The Genius of Marian focuses on a family affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Marian Williams Steele (1912–2001) was a noted watercolor artist who died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 89. Pam White, her daughter, at age 61 began to compose a book, The Genius of Marian, as a tribute to her mother.

16Aug

The Bucket List

The two men initially banter with each other and then develop a supportive relationship. When Edward finds a discarded “bucket list” started and then abandoned by Carter, he suggests that they make it a joint list and then go out and do the things on the list while they are still able.
08Aug

Assisted Living

Assisted Living is an engaging film—part fiction, part documentary—that takes us into the nitty-gritty of life in a long-term care facility in the United States. The film is unusually rich and perceptive in its portrayal of images and themes associated with aging in an institutional setting. It is the creation of a 22-year-old film student.
04Aug

Into the Other Lane: Driving and Dementia

Into the Other Lane: Driving and Dementia, the longer of the two videos, relates the stories of five individuals and their care providers who are affected by dementia-related cognitive impairment.
16Jun

Quartet

A new film directed by Dustin Hoffman, takes place in an upscale retirement home in the classical rolling countryside of the United Kingdom. One of the best things about the film is the ever-recurring stream of live and energetic classical music pouring out of it. Another is watching older professional performers play and/or sing this music.
08Jun

Amour

After winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012, Michael Haneke’s Amour has received rave reviews from most reviewers, and more recently, an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. At first viewing, Amour seems like it could be a departure from Haneke’s other films, which ask the viewer to tolerate wanton violence or at least the ever-foreboding threat of violence.
04Jun

Ten More Good Years

Ten More Good Years documents the experience of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender aging. Prior to viewing this outstanding film, I wondered why anyone with any sensitivity would lump lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender aging within one now-familiar acronym—LGBT. Categorical thinking, after all, makes far too easy the negative stereotyping and discrimination used so often to create, denigrate, and disenfranchise those who are not “straight.”
08Apr

To Age or Not to Age

In To Age or Not to Age, independent filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas has put together a fascinating exploration of what current research has discovered about the potential to alter the biological process of aging in humans and other animal life forms. The film does a good job of taking a potentially difficult to understand science and making it understandable at a basic level. In the film, several leading researchers talk about how discoveries that were made in the early 1980s are now being refined and brought to clinical trials to test their effectiveness at delaying the onset of major diseases in humans, and thereby extending the human life span.
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.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood