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All Film Reviews

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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.
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.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood