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All Film Reviews

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11May

Revolutionizing Dementia Care

Gerontologists are becoming increasingly aware of the advent and growth of the person-oriented model of care for individuals diagnosed with dementia or related conditions. Our On Film and Digital Media team has shared previous reviews of wonderful documentaries illustrating individually tailored applications of such care as creative role involvement, personalized music, and painting (Scheidt, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019, respectively).
11May

The Wife

The title of this film might foster assumptions about the underlying dramatic conflict that is at the film’s core, namely, a growing resentment on the part of a traditional wife standing behind the accomplishments of a husband who is a successful writer. The film itself does not quickly dismiss those assumptions.
11Feb

The Kominsky Method

Humor can sometimes be a helpful diversion in dealing with uncomfortable emotions—but humor that is flippant and tin-eared is not. If I were confined to one adjective that best defines the new Netflix comedy, The Kominsky Method, it would be “flippant.”
11Feb

Quilts in Women’s Lives

Quilters. What comes to mind? If you do not quilt and know little about those who do, perhaps you see an image of a frail old woman wearing a lavender dress with a lace collar. She is seated in a rocker and stitching with needle and thread (Fons, 2018).
11May

Tell Them Who You Are

Tell Them Who You Are is an entertaining and richly integrated film about the search for disclosure between an adult son and his iconic father, now in his 80s. The father, Haskell Wexler, is a preeminent and prolific cinematographer who worked on many critically acclaimed films throughout his long career, including American Graffiti and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
11Apr

Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts

By contrast, the opening of Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts presents a staccato march of sound bites invoking dire scenarios. “Alzheimer’s is an epic disease.” “It’s going to sink the health care economy.” “This disease will take us down.”
11Apr

Living with Alzheimer’s and Dementia

Living with Alzheimer’s and Dementia is introduced by singer Kathy Mattea who, after noting the struggles and challenges dementia brings to individuals and families, asks “How can you continue to live fully even with that diagnosis, and how can we as a community better support those who are living with dementia and their care partners?”
11Feb

Marjorie Prime

Memory, and its loss, is a well-worn theme in many films, including several that explore the loss of memory due to dementia. But Marjorie Prime presents us with a new and intriguing supposition regarding the future of personal memories.
31Jan

The Babushkas of Chernobyl (reviewed by Rick Scheidt)

There is a magnetic attraction in the stories of elders, who by choice or happenstance, face unique, and extreme life scenarios that exceed the imaginations of those of us who live securely under the thicker part of the normal curve. The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a riveting watershed for gerontologists.
11Jan

That Evening Sun

That Evening Sun, based on a short story by William Gay, tells the story of an old Tennessee farmer’s struggle to reclaim his farm and home. Widower Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) ends up in a nursing home after slipping on a patch of ice and breaking a hip.
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.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood