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All Film Reviews

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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.
16Sep

Life in Stills

The themes of memory, love, and loss that are central to Angel’s Perch are also found in the documentary film, Life in Stills , but with a different mixture. The grandmother–grandson relationship in this film is of an entirely different character than that presented in Angel’s Perch .
16Sep

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Saving the worst for last, the sequel film, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel should only be seen if you have exhausted every other diversion available to you.
16Sep

Friend Request Pending

Friend Request Pending is a refreshingly unique short-sketch film that features a few hours in the life of an older woman making an online connection with a desirable man.
16Sep

Five Flights Up

In Five Flights Up, a long-married couple faces the decision to sell their five-story walkup in New York City. Alex (Morgan Freeman) and Ruth (Diane Keaton) have lived their entire married life together in this apartment walkup and are now finding it more difficult to deal with the stairs.
16Sep

Last Vegas

In the film, Last Vegas (Turteltaub, 2013), four older men romp like frat boys in Vegas while a paper thin plot resurrects a past grievance between two of them.
16Sep

All Together

The premise of the film has potential; five older longtime friends move into one house in order to support each other in the face of a variety of health issues.
16Sep

Unfinished Song

Unfinished Song (Williams, 2012) presents us with another story of transformation—this time, that of a grumpy old man.
16Sep

This is 40

In the recently released, This Is 40, we are shown a week in the lives of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) who are both turning 40. Debbie’s method of dealing with this is flat-out denial, whereas Pete is fine with a party for himself.
16Sep

Trouble With the Curve

The recent feature film, Trouble with the Curve, portrays a different concern with the effects of aging. An alternative title for this film could have been Trouble with Aging. Clint Eastwood plays a crusty ill-tempered oldster (just as he did a few years ago in Gran Torino).
16Sep

How to Live Forever

Mark Wexler’s odyssey in How to Live Forever is an energetic, sometimes serious, sometimes amusing, but always interesting popular culture panorama about humankind’s efforts to extend both active and maximum longevity.
14Sep

Old People Driving: A Film About the End of the Road

Shaleece Haas’s award-winning short video, Old People Driving, is a charming film. This video focuses on two very old, cognitively intact men—Haas’s 96-year-old grandfather, Milton, and 99-year-old Herbert. The choice of Milton and Herbert signals a useful view into our future, as ranks of drivers aged 85 and older are swelling with the population aging of the oldest old.
10Sep

Nebraska

In contrast, Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s new movie about a son accompanying his addled and self-absorbed father’s unlikely quest for the million dollars he thinks he has won in a sweepstakes, does not give viewers much to smile at.
09Sep

Going in Style (1979 original)

But before I did that, I decided to watch the original film by the same name from 1979 that the newer Going in Style is based on. I’m glad I did. Where the new film is stale and trite, the original film is engaging and deeply respectful of elders.
07Sep

Innocence

The one other film that deals authentically with late life marital intimacy is Innocence, produced and directed by Australian filmmaker Paul Cox in 2000. Like Hope Springs, Innocence addresses the issue of lifelessness and resignation in the relationship of an older couple.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood