Movie Suggestions

Movies, like all forms of art, are a great way of exploring and understanding different themes and stages of life. Below are some movies that explore the themes of late career, ageing and retirement in various ways.

• Ford vs Ferrari (2019)
  • Follow Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) whose second act sees him attempting to build a car to win an important race for Ford.
  • 92% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Diane (2019)
  • For Diane (Mary Kay Place), everyone else comes first. Generous but with little patience for self-pity, she spends her days checking in on sick friends, volunteering at her local soup kitchen, and trying valiantly to save her troubled, drug-addicted adult son (Jake Lacy) from himself. But beneath her relentless routine of self-sacrifice, Diane is fighting a desperate internal battle, haunted by a past she can’t forget, and which threatens to tear her increasingly chaotic world apart.
  • The film has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and is described as a “beautifully human portrait of a woman rifling through the wreckage of her life in search of redemption.”

• Tea with the Dames/Nothing Like a Dame (2018)
  • Join Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Eileen Atkins and Dame Joan Plowright for a weekend in the country to reminisce and share their entertaining thoughts on art, ageing and love.
  • 98% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Mamma Mia: Here we go again (2018)
  • A fun music filmed romp about how relationships forged in the past resonate in the present.
  • 79% on Rotten Tomatoes

• St Vincent (2014)
  • A beautiful film about a bad-tempered gentleman who gets a new lease on life when a young boy moves in next door.
  • 77% on Rotten Tomatoes

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 and 1947)
  • Not a retirement/ageing-specific film but the themes of making the most of your time left are universal.

• The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared (2016)
  • An Oscar award nominee, this film is about Allan Karlsson, a 100-year-old explosives expert, who escapes from a retirement home to have one last adventure.
  • 68% on Rotten Tomatoes

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)
  • Some British retirees (Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy) decide to outsource their retirement to exotic — and less expensive — India. Lured by advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and imagining a life of leisure in lush surroundings, they arrive and find that the Marigold is actually a shell of its former self. Though their new home is not quite what they had imagined, the retirees find that life and love can begin again when they let go of their pasts.
  • 78% on Rotten Tomatoes

• About Schmidt (2002)
  • Starring Jack Nicholson, a new retiree is feeling uninspired by life until they take a cross country RV trip to stop his daughter’s marriage.
  • 86% on Rotten Tomatoes

• The Bucket List (2007)
  • Starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, this film centres around the theme of it never being too late to do what you want.

• Up (2009)
  • An exciting, funny, and poignant adventure, Up offers an impeccably crafted story told with wit and arranged with depth, as well as yet another visual Pixar treat.
  • 98% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Calendar Girls (2004)
  • After the death of her best friend’s husband from cancer, spirited Yorkshire housewife Chris Harper (Helen Mirren) hatches a scheme to raise money for a memorial to him. She encourages Annie (Julie Walters) and their friends to create a calendar — with the novel detail of using the middle-aged women of their village as nude models.
  • 74% on Rotten Tomatoes

• On Golden Pond (1981)
  • Irritable retiree Norman Thayer (Henry Fonda) and his appeasing wife, Ethel (Katharine Hepburn), spend summers at their New England vacation home on the shores of idyllic Golden Pond. This year, their adult daughter, Chelsea (Jane Fonda), visits with her new fiancée and his teenage son, Billy (Doug McKeon). After leaving Billy behind to bond with Norman, Chelsea returns, attempting to repair the long-strained relationship with her aging father before it’s too late.
  • 93% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Crazy Heart (2009)
  • Jeff Bridges won the Academy Award for Best Actor in his portrayal of a musician who is forced to re-assess his life when a young reporter arrives to do a story on him.
  • 90% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Harry and Tonto (1974)
  • Harry Coombes (Art Carney) is a man in his seventies who is evicted from his Manhattan apartment when the building is set to be demolished. After staying briefly with his son Burt (Phil Bruns), Harry decides to travel across the country, accompanied by his cat, Tonto, to visit his other grown children. However, his visits defy his expectations.
  • 88% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Tokyo Story (1953)
  • The elderly Shukishi (Chishu Ryu) and his wife, Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi (Sô Yamamura), a doctor, and their daughter, Shige (Haruko Sugimura), a hairdresser, don’t have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko (Setsuko Hara), the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
  • 100% on Rotten Tomatoes

• Wild Strawberries (1957)
  • Crotchety retired doctor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) travels from Stockholm to Lund, Sweden, with his pregnant and unhappy daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), in order to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. Along the way, they encounter a series of hitchhikers, each of whom causes the elderly doctor to muse upon the pleasures and failures of his own life. These include the vivacious young Sara (Bibi Andersson), a dead ringer for the doctor’s own first love.
  • 94% on Rotten Tomatoes

 

Please note: We haven’t been able to watch all these films and we added some based on a combination of reading synopsis/reviews. If you have any films you think we should add or if you have a problem with any of the films included, please reach out.