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Home and Community in Later Life

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16Sep

Five Flights Up

In Five Flights Up, a long-married couple faces the decision to sell their five-story walkup in New York City. Alex (Morgan Freeman) and Ruth (Diane Keaton) have lived their entire married life together in this apartment walkup and are now finding it more difficult to deal with the stairs.
16Sep

Last Vegas

In the film, Last Vegas (Turteltaub, 2013), four older men romp like frat boys in Vegas while a paper thin plot resurrects a past grievance between two of them.
16Sep

All Together

The premise of the film has potential; five older longtime friends move into one house in order to support each other in the face of a variety of health issues.
16Sep

Unfinished Song

Unfinished Song (Williams, 2012) presents us with another story of transformation—this time, that of a grumpy old man.
11Aug

Nourish the Body and Soul

Nourish the Body and Soul is a well-crafted, solution-filled, uplifting video that shows long-term care providers ways to enhance dining experiences of residents in their facilities. Produced by Action Pact, a culture change company, the film illustrates innovative, context-specific dining options currently used in a dozen nursing homes across the United States.
11Mar

Some Kind of Heaven

The overriding question that this new feature-length documentary may trigger for viewers is: What is the meaning of life in its later years? Some Kind of Heaven follows the lives of four older individuals who are living in The Villages, a huge and sprawling retirement community an hour north of Orlando, Florida.
31Jan

I Won’t Go

Oli Truss is a single older housebound woman in her nineties who lives alone in her rural home somewhere in Britain. As a child, videographer Georgina Hurcombe was her neighbor. She recalls the animals running around on Oli’s property and how “she used to teach me math after school.” That was 15 years ago.
31Jan

Forever, Chinatown

Emmy-nominated Forever, Chinatown is the most enchanting and salutary documentary film I have ever viewed. Director James Chan explores the remarkable psychological and physical embodiment of “sense of place” exuded by the artistic creations of 81-year-old artist Frank Wong.
11Oct

Grow Old Along with Me: The Poetry of Aging – Part 2

Few poets celebrate aging as exuberantly as Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” Browning’s optimistic sentiments are purposefully embodied in the title and content of this lovely film produced by videographers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele.
06Sep

What They Had

In the opening scenes of this captivating film, an older woman gets out of bed in the dark, gets partially dressed, and walks out of the house in a light jacket into a snowy night. The shot holds on her walking down the street for several seconds until she disappears into a shower of heavy snowfall. A wife/mother has disappeared, setting off panic on the part of her husband and children.
11Jul

Diane

Diane is one of those rare films that reflects human life as it is—in all its personal complexity—rather than one of the more commonly gratuitous films that present excessively dramatized/glamorized views of life as many wish it to be.
11Jun

95 And 6 To Go

In 95 And 6 To Go, videographer Kimi Takesue introduces us to her grandfather, Mr. Tom Takesue, a 95-year-old Japanese American and resident of Hawaii. Videographer Kimi has returned to Hawaii to provide him with “support and assistance” due to the recent death of his wife, Ethel.
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).
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.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood