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All Film Reviews

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03Aug

I’ll See You in My Dreams

Based on the verbal descriptions I had seen, I was ready to not like this film. My assumption: another film on the woes of dating and attaching in late life. While that is part of this film’s content, there is more, much more.  And it is the more that slowly develops, and envelops, until the very last frames of this well-made film.
04Jun

The Intern

Not often does a film as entertainingly watchable as The Intern carry within it a positive regard for the multigenerational nature of human life in the 21st century. Generational chasms may still exist in big sectors of our culture, but films like The Intern may help reduce their size. Not that The Intern is a didactic “message” film; far from it. It is light on its feet and simply fun to watch as it unfolds the story of a successful but harried young executive learning to accept, and then trust, the help of an older worker.
04Apr

Youth

Early in this film, a remark from one of its characters laments the fact that he has become known as an actor mostly for playing the role of a robot in one particular film. This remark turns out to be a reflection of the very nature of the film, Youth. Throughout much of its 2 hours, the film feels like it could have been made by a robot. The story line moves along in fits and starts, and the characters often speak their lines with an isolated demeanor rather than truly engaging with each other. Approached in the right way, however, the film can still be a pleasure to watch.
17Mar

Grandma (reviewed by Thomas R. Cole, PhD)

Grandma opens with the epigram “Time Passes, that’s for sure.” The film takes place in a single day and takes the form of a mini-road trip on which Elle (Lilly Tomlin)—a grandmother in her 70s who has just cut up her credit cards and is broke—sets out with her pregnant granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) to find $630 for an abortion and make it to her late afternoon appointment at a women’s health clinic.
04Dec

Angel’s Perch

Angel’s Perch opens with a close-up shot of a young woman sleepily protesting having a cell phone camera recording her. The person with the camera responds “We’re going to want to remember these things someday.” Then, taking out a family heirloom ring, he proposes to the suddenly wide awake woman.
08Oct

Still Life

Said Ismael Otruk is an 83 year-old Palestinian man born in the town of Acre in the 1930s. Now part of Israel, Acre is approximately 4,000 years old—“one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world”. Said and his family were forced to move from Acre during the Palestinian resettlement of 1948.
04Oct

Wrinkles

Life in a long-term care facility is rarely explored in narrative films. A couple of exceptions to this, Quartet and Assisted Living , were recently reviewed in this journal ( Vanden Bosch, 2013 ). This topic remains one of the frontiers we do not enjoy visiting in our culture.
04Aug

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a wonderfully composed film about the reuniting of an older Chinese father with his only daughter after years of continental separation.
29Jun

Mum and me

There has been a modest but notable increase in the number of fiction and nonfiction films addressing the subject of dementia in recent decades. Scottish documentary maker Sue Bourne’s 2008 film, Mum and Me, fits firmly into this burgeoning nonfiction subgenre.
08Feb

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel (Skogland, 2007), based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author, Margaret Laurence, takes us on a life review through the eyes and memories of its main character, 90 year old Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn). Faced with undefined health issues, she fiercely resists the attempts of her son and his wife to move her into a nursing home.
04Feb

My Love Affair With the Brain: The Life and Science of Dr. Marian Diamond

Move back historically to the formal birth and popularization of Rowe and Kahn’s paradigm for successful aging. Move back still farther to the 1970 and 1980 decades where gestational studies show how environmental experiences and lifestyle account for physical and psychological changes once thought due solely to primary aging. Clearly, “successful aging” and its sibs—productive aging, positive aging, and optimal aging—have a rich vertical lineage spanning several generations of researchers.
06Dec

Love Is Strange

Of all the stories we enjoy hearing and seeing in films, stories about love—or the lack of it—seem to be at the top of the list. Try to think for a moment of a film that tells a story without any love-related component.
04Dec

No Age Limit: Creativity and Aging

Old timers in gerontology will remember the challenge of its early days as we tried to convince a doubtful public as well as our skeptical students that human aging had any “up-side” at all. Successful aging was not yet a common part of our vocabulary.
04Oct

Forget Me Not

When I first heard about this feature length documentary, I was prepared to see the same kind of story that has been filmed again and again—the usual angst that is so often presented in documentaries about this painful journey of families dealing with the loss of cognition and then recognition. But after just a few minutes into this family’s story, I sensed that this film would be different.
02Oct

Josef’s Daughter

There is much that is novel about Josef’s Daughter. However, the viewer must be willing to move beyond its now-familiar message that middle aged adults are often confronted with a fresh awareness that aging and death are inexorably linked, that this linkage has undeniable personal relevance for them, and that some of them may have a difficult time coping with the fearsome implications of these facts.
03Aug

Backseat Bingo

For those too young to remember, “Backseat Bingo” is a 1950’s term for light sexual activity (or more) that occurs in the back seat of a vehicle. Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo is a 6-min animated documentary that invites a handful of retired elders to share their personal attitudes and values about sex, romance, and aging.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood