The year is 2022! What happened? How did time pass so quickly? The world is one year older and getting older every day. While Hollywood and culture seem to obsess over youthfulness and stereotypical, unrealistic beauty standards, many films embrace the passage of time and the twilight years of the human experience. While the elderly are often relegated to secondary characters and mere comic relief, some of the greatest films in history are interested in ageing and what it means to grow old, together or alone.

M. Night Shyamalan's 2021 film Old presented ageing in a fast-paced, horrifying way. As interesting as that film was, many others take their time exploring another year in the life of octogenarians and others who have more to look back on than they do to look forward to. Growing older can be sad, a reminder of mortality and fragility, but it can also be a beautiful, dignified passage into a different type of existence. Here are the best films about ageing and getting older, for yet another new year.

10 Make Way for Tomorrow

A good look at the concept of generation gap!
Paramount Pictures Studios

While never the most popular topic, the theme of ageing in cinema is as old as cinema itself. But the issue is always treated as a problem, andoften an economic one. Accordingly, the elderly appear on the screen as a burden (economic or psychological) who either live on their own or cause grief in the lives of others. Make Way for Tomorrow was one of the first films to focus exclusively on the emotional and psychological experiences of the elderly. It concerns an elderly couple who lost their home in the after the great depression of 1929-- initially becoming economically dependent on their children, first separating, going to different children, and then breaking away from life amid the insensitivity and selfishness of their offspring. The film, which also inspired Yasujiro Ozu's famous Tokyo Story, is one of the first and most important films to deal with ageing as a social and psychological problem.

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9 Ikiru

Watanabe dies while swinging on a swing in the newly built park and humming the song 'Life is Short'. He has a big, heartfelt smile on his face.
Toho

Ikiru (or To Live) is Akira Kurosawa's unforgettable film about a man who is a meaningless cog in a big wheel, like many in society. 'Living' has certain basic needs known to everyone: nutrition, respiration, excretion, etc. A person in a coma also does these things, but we do not consider her/him truly "alive'" we wait for the day s/he hopefully awakens. So, what does a person need to truly 'live'? The answer to this question is a bit complicated. Great director Kurosawa seeks to answer this thought-provoking question in his masterpiece about a man who does not complain about his bureaucratic work, but has no other choice than to quit but his job when he finds out that he has cancer. As the man tries to find a worldly purpose for himself before his end, the film unspools from Kurosawa's mind like a poem.

8 Umberto D.

Umberto is thinking in the room with his beloved dog.
The Criterion Collection

In Umberto D., one of the top films of Italian Neo-Realism, Vittorio De Sica uses non-professional actors to tell the story of an older man's struggle for economic existence at the end of his life. Although the film was not popular in Italy, it gained international fame, so much so that the well-known Swedish director Ingmar Bergman watched it over a hundred times and critic Roger Ebert included it in his list of Great Movies. Umberto is a former civil servant in post-war Rome, struggling to survive with the pension he receives and attempting to pay rent before being evicted, bearing his landlady's insults every day without protest because he has no other choice. He is old, he cannot work, his pension is not enough for anything, but the love he has for his dog helps keep him alive in this heartbreaking, powerful film.

7 Tokyo Story

In Tokyo Story, Ozu does not structure the plot in a Western way. This does not mean that Ozu ignores the narrative. Ozu does not show "death", which can be considered a turning point in the narrative formula of Hollywood Cinema. It shows the front and the back of death, that is, what it leaves behind; it chooses an indirect narrative. He is not concerned with the storm, but with what he leaves behind.
Shochiku

Yasujiro Ozu does not have his name on his tombstone; instead, it only has the character mu, meaning "nothing." His cinema is rooted in the same kind of minimalist philosophy, from a source whereby substance is patiently sought not with action but silence. Ozu's Tokyo Story, one of those special names whose cinema has influenced directors travelling around different genres, envelops the director's filmography like ivy, containing all the tones of his cinema. In a Westernized Japan,an elderly couple decides to go away from the modern world to the countryside. In the journey to Tokyo to visit the patriarch's children, they encounter their offspring's disregard instead of attention and experience great disappointment, in this quiet meditation on legacy, lineage, and old age.

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6 Wild Strawberries

The movie starts with a dream that Isak had.
AB Svensk Filmindustri

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries examines the human obsession with mortality and legacy by zeroing in on the journey of one man who travels home in order to receive the title of honorary professor. This is a sometimes surreal, always empathetic journey through intellect and loneliness, expecially that of the elderly. With Bergman's familiar themes of God, dreams, memories, and childhood following him, the main character relives his life during the twilight of his old age. Wild Strwaberries is frequently considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, and is undoubtedly one of the most poignant and haunting looks at ageing.

5 The Leopard

The iconic ballroom dance scene in The Leopard
20th Century Fox

A dazzling epic based on Guiseppe di Lampedusa's novel about the collapse of the Italian aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie, funded by 20th Century-Fox and critically acclaimed upon its European release, The Leopard ultimately bombed when it premiered in the U.S. but has since received a critical appraisal and acclaim. Burt Lancaster, who plays an old prince trying to adapt to the rapidly changing social structure of 1860s Italy, marries his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) away to Angela (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, in order to secure his status and lifestyle. Throughout the lavishly staged productiont, he meditates on both his social class and his past and present. Only an aristocratic Marxist like Luchino Visconti could have directed such a film, which describes the interaction between both an ageing individual and ageing society splendidly. Moreover, the nearly hour-long ballroom scene, in which the aristocrats admit that power is now in the hands of the newly rich, is rightfully considered one of the most masterfully shot scenes in the history of cinema.

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4 Still Life

An old man and his wife have been living in a desolate and remote place for years. The old man works and stays alone at a station in this desolate place. However, when a young man's new assignment becomes the station where he works, and his relocation is the end of everything. The old man must now leave his home and move to an unknown place.
Telfilm

One of the most important works of Iranian cinema, Tabiate Bijan (or Still Life) shows that a human's worst enemy is his mind, especially an older mind. With their limited perceptual capacity, humans destroy what they cannot comprehend and are afraid of what they can't grasp. In this film, the audience is granted distant access to an elderly couple as they perform their daily rituals, unaccompanied by music and narrative trappings, blurring the fictional aspect of the movie with documentary realism. The routines of the old couple living in the countryside flow with calmness and sameness in the film's provincial town, where nothing new is expected at the end of a long life.

3 Strangers in Good Company (1990)

A bus breaks down in an empty lot. Eight elderly women, whose average age is seventy-one, are stranded in a dilapidated farmhouse.
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

Elderly women are forced to be alone with nature when their bus breaks down on the road in Strangers in Good Company, a Canadian docufiction which allows each of the film's women (all elderly but one) room to improvise. The experiences in the movie develop completely spontaneously as the pain, sadness, and happiness of different women in old age intermingle. We see how similar life is for everyone; though each woman shares her own specific stories, the unifying human condition (especially at the end of these lives' stories) is portrayed beautifully

2 The Straight Story

Alvin Straight is an old man who even fought in WWII. His daughter, Rose, is speech-impaired. They share a quiet life.
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

A film about old age, family bonds, and stubbornness as seen through the incomparable eyes of David Lynch. Many wouldn't have believed that a Lynch movie could ever be released by Disney or make people tearfully emotional, but he proved them wrong. Richard Farnsworth tenderly plays Alvin, a farmer struggling to survive in a small place with his daughter, due to Alvin's poor health and inability to do most things alone. But one day, when this fascinating old man learns that his brother has had a heart attack, he aims to travel the country and reunite filian bonds by riding his lawnmower on a long journey to reunite with his brother. Strange but sweet, this is a beautiful and warm film about reconnecting in the twilight years.

1 Amour

Michael Haneke, one of the most important directors of our time, turned his camera, which he directed at the world we live in and the devices and institutions that created it, directly to human beings in 2012's Amour, and the resulting film took its place in the history of cinema as a masterpiece that is difficult to digest and touching.
Les Films du Losange

Amour (or Love) can put anyone into an internal questioning process. One of the most important directors of our time, Michael Haneke turned his typically cold and apathetic camera into an empathy machine with Amour, and the result is a difficult-to-digest but touching modern masterpiece. The film shows that if old age and love melt in the same pot, then pain, illness, and codependency simmer with them. A poetic and realistic journey following an elderly couple throughout their peaceful routines until the woman's sudden stroke tests the old man's devotion and love. The film asks some painful questions about love, dying, and suffering, and takes the viewer on an intimate tour through old age quite unlike any other film in cinematic history.