Newsletter

Get the latest fashion trends, the best in travel and my life.

Health Care

Click on any title or image to read full review

18Apr

Life and Death in Assisted Living (reviewed by Eilon Caspi, PhD)

The film Life and Death in Assisted Living (PBS Frontline and ProPublica, 2013: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/life-and-death-in-assisted-living/) examined the care practices of Emeritus Corporation, which at the time was the country’s largest assisted living (AL) company.
11Nov

The Mole Agent

Have you ever wished to be a “fly on the wall” in a residential care facility so you could observe the kind of care being given to a family member, or just to see the kind of dynamic being played out between residents and staff? Watching The Mole Agent will give you a sense of what that would be like.
21May

Linking Up: The Graying of AIDs

Well-known gerontologist Dr. James Birren once told me that in the late 1940s, all of the gerontologists in the United States could fit comfortably in one modest size hotel meeting room. He should know; he was there. Thanks to the leadership of Birren and so many others, modern gerontology has advanced vigorously since those days. Since its founding in 1945, the Gerontological Society of America has provided a formal organization for linking the diverse disciplines defining the study of aging and aged individuals.
11Feb

From Nine to Ninety

From Nine to Ninety deals with a common family situation in the United States—providing care for older adults within a multigenerational household setting. It focuses on a single family that shares the common challenges faced by many other families that currently struggle with adult caregiving.
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).
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.
08Aug

Assisted Living

Assisted Living is an engaging film—part fiction, part documentary—that takes us into the nitty-gritty of life in a long-term care facility in the United States. The film is unusually rich and perceptive in its portrayal of images and themes associated with aging in an institutional setting. It is the creation of a 22-year-old film student.
16Jun

Quartet

A new film directed by Dustin Hoffman, takes place in an upscale retirement home in the classical rolling countryside of the United Kingdom. One of the best things about the film is the ever-recurring stream of live and energetic classical music pouring out of it. Another is watching older professional performers play and/or sing this music.
08Feb

Fred Won’t Move Out

One of the biggest challenges in creating a narrative film around a character who has dementia is to convincingly portray the effects of that dementia. Dementia is usually not something one can “act” from internal experience. It can only be portrayed by closely observing the wide ranging effects that a cognitive impairment like dementia imposes.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood