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All Film Reviews

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10Oct

I, Daniel Blake

Shot and directed in such a way as to feel very much like an unscripted documentary, I, Daniel Blake has a feel of immediacy that places the viewer right alongside the characters in the film, experiencing and feeling what they are living.
10Aug

Care

The new documentary, Care, aired recently on the WORLD Channel’s America ReFramed series, is the first documentary I know of that takes a deeply personal and behind the scenes look at the workings of the care-at-home system in the United States. It presents the stories of four elderly care-at-home recipients (three of these are in urban New York and one in rural Pennsylvania).
10Aug

The Discovery

In stark contrast to Uncle Boonmee, this film takes a much more Western approach, calling on science to give us proof of ongoing life after death. The film opens with neurology scientist Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) giving an interview to a journalist.
10Aug

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a refreshingly different film by Thai director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, that presents a seemingly casual acceptance of reincarnation as a given.
10May

The Sense of an Ending

In The Sense of an Ending, we finally have another film that reflects on a character’s early and later life personas. The film’s main character, Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), is jostled out of his somewhat routinized and placid life by a letter from the mother of one of his first serious girlfriends in college some 45 years earlier.
02Apr

Beginners

Beginners opens with two silent shots—a close up of a vase of semi-fresh daisies and then a vacant living room with several boxes stacked to one side. In the next scene, also mostly silent, a young man removes some shirts from a closet, folds them, and places them in a box.
05Feb

Cloudburst (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)

Wanting to end on a lighter note, our final film was Cloudburst, a good-natured comedy starring Olivia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker, about a lesbian couple who takes a road trip to Canada to get married.
05Feb

Hope Springs (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)

Most of us had already seen our third movie, Hope Springs, but we were surprised that tasked by the instructions to look for intimacy, we viewed the movie differently the second time.
04Feb

45 Years (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)

45 Years, a recent film about a husband and wife about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary when the wife learns he was once engaged to another woman, led to our deepest and lengthiest discussion.
02Feb

Cloud 9 (reviewed by Gayle Doll, PhD)

I spent a lot of time prepping the group for the German movie, Cloud 9, which tells a story of a woman who has an affair with one of her customers for her tailoring business.
04Jan

45 Years (reviewed by Arlo Compaan, PhD)

In “45 Years,” the organizing story line is the revelations about the marriage that result from Geoff’s learning of the discovery of the ice-encased, frozen body of Katya, his first love, who died when they were hiking in the Alps.
02Jan

Cloud 9 (reviewed by Arlo Compaan, PhD)

“Cloud 9” portrays the transformation of Inge, a 67-year-old woman, who discovers her positive shadow through a sexually alive relationship with Karl, a 76-year-old man. In her long-term marital relationship, she had not come to know the passion of her own sexual body.
04Dec

45 Years

An intriguing variation on the love triangle conceit has been created in the 2015 film, 45 Years.
03Oct

Last Chance Harvey

Last Chance Harvey (Hopkins, 2008) tells the story of an older musician, Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman), long ago divorced and somewhat estranged from his daughter, finding new love when he travels to London to attend his daughter’s wedding.
02Oct

Cloud 9

Cloud 9 (Dresen, 2008) is an extraordinary film from Germany that, in a way, bridges the gap between films that portray new love in later life and films that explore long-term love in later life.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood