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All Film Reviews

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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.
18Apr

Life and Death in Assisted Living (reviewed by Eilon Caspi, PhD)

The film Life and Death in Assisted Living (PBS Frontline and ProPublica, 2013: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/life-and-death-in-assisted-living/) examined the care practices of Emeritus Corporation, which at the time was the country’s largest assisted living (AL) company.
01Feb

The Father (reviewed by Jim Vanden Bosch)

Nearly all the reviews of The Father in mainstream publications are enthralled with the film’s attempt to see dementia from the inside out—that is, from within the mind of the person experiencing dementia.
01Feb

The Father (reviewed by Rose Capp, PhD)

In the course of his seminal work in the dementia care field, Tom Kitwood noted that it was impossible “ … to enter fully into the experiential frame of another person, simply because each person is unique” (Kitwood, 1997, p. 71). Kitwood went on to observe that stepping into and describing the world of someone living with dementia, particularly in the more advanced stages, involved additional complexities, given that first-person accounts typically describe the early stages of dementia.
01Feb

The Father (reviewed by Cyndy Hunt Luzinski, MS,RN)

After Anthony Hopkins won the 2021 Oscar for best actor in The Father, our Dementia Together team viewed the film and found it creatively compelling and hopelessly heart-breaking—everything the cultural “tragedy narrative” around dementia would have us believe is inevitable and true.
20Nov

The Guardians

The Guardians does have some serious flaws, both structurally and tonally. At the outset, the narrative is hard to follow because a variety of people appear and speak without any identification; we do not know who they are and what their credentials are.
11Nov

I Care a Lot

Under the guise of benevolent guardianship, certain individuals in this country have learned how to use the legal system to steal the savings and property of vulnerable older adults after consigning them to a long-term care facility. These are not just a handful of bad-apple people; scores of them are operating throughout the United States—but just how many, no one knows.
06Oct

No Time to Waste: The Urgent Mission of Betty Reid Soskin

No Time to Waste introduces us to 95-year-old African American Betty Soskin, a woman who has lived through sharply dissonant epochs of racism in the United States. From birth through adulthood, she experienced the manifest race discrimination prevalent in the United States during a significant portion of the twentieth century.
30Sep

Ask Dr. Ruth

By speaking publicly and frankly about sexuality, Dr. Ruth Westheimer helped untold numbers of individuals overcome impediments to healthy sexual pleasure. The new film, Ask Dr Ruth, chronicles her long life, from her early childhood in Germany, to her current very active professional life.
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.
17Sep

Another Year

Another Year, written and directed by Mike Leigh in 2010, is the singular and exceptional example of a film that portrays an older married couple without resorting to the traditional story line structured around a threat to the relationship.
17Sep

Le Weekend

Another way to dramatically explore the character of an older spousal relationship is to locate the conflict within the relationship itself. The 2013 film, Le Weekend (written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell), does this quite effectively.
17Sep

Something’s Gotta Give

An older wealthy tycoon (played by Jack Nicholson) dates only younger women until he meets the mother of one of them (yes, played by Diane Keaton) and eventually realizes what he’s been missing in a relationship.
17Sep

And So It Goes

This film spins a story of later-life romance using hand-me-down dialogue, story line, and characters. (Even the title lacks imagination.) In this woeful film, Michael Douglas plays the typical angry older (but youngish looking) adult whose wife has died.
17Sep

Love is All You Need

In the Danish film, Love Is All You Need (Bier, 2013) a very similar story unfolds—newly found romantic connection in the context of the wedding of children. An anger-holding long-time widower attends his son’s wedding in Italy, and while there becomes increasingly attracted to and then deeply in love with the mother of his daughter-in-law to be.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood