Old folks rarely find a good home onscreen

‘The Sunshine Boys’
Probably Neil Simon’s best original screenplay deals with a retired vaudeville duo, Lewis (George Burns) and Clark (Walter Matthau), who agree to reunite for a TV spectacular despite the fact that they hate each other’s guts. While the film signaled the legendary Burns’ return to popular culture — and kicked off a successful final act to a showbiz career — almost as notable was the fact that few American movies had centered around elderly men, much less old guys who verbally battled with no holds barred. “Sunshine Boys” was like “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” for guys, without the Grand Guignol makeup.

‘Before I Forget’
The idea that old people used to be sexual outlaws — or, worse still, that they might still be sexually active themselves — is one of the cinema’s last taboos. Leave it to French filmmaker Jacques Nolot (“Porn Theater”) not only to examine the subject head on but also to play the lead role of a 58-year-old gay man facing his life’s demons as well as his ongoing battle with HIV. (Nolot’s Pierre character may be the youngest person on this list at 58, but the gay community is quite possibly even less forgiving of aging than the future civilization of “Logan’s Run.”) Pierre meets with friends, talks about his years as a hustler, wonders if he’ll inherit enough money to make his dotage comfortable and occasionally seeks out rough trade. This is a rare cinematic portrait of aging with horniness intact.

‘Children of Nature’
Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s 1991 Oscar nominee for best foreign film is a road picture and a compelling portrait of aging amour fou. A pensioner gets shuttled off to a Reykjavik retirement home, only to discover that the resident troublemaker and malcontent is his childhood sweetheart. Together, the two of them formulate a plan to bust the joint, hotwire a car and speed off to the little town where the pair grew up. It’s a perfectly sweet little movie that never, ever condescends to its characters or to the audience.

‘Harold & Maude’

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All screen portrayals of iconoclastic eighty-somethings with a bold zest for living must be rated against Ruth Gordon’s sublime portrayal in this influential dark comedy. While Maude inspires the death-obsessed Harold (Bud Cort) to come out of his shell and start living, you never get the feeling that the character has been sitting around waiting for a young person to come along to validate her existence. Nor does her ebullience for life’s experiences turn her into someone you don’t want to be stuck sitting next to on an airplane. Maude’s a role model to all of us who hope to always hunger for everything the world has to offer.

‘Strangers in Good Company’
Seven elderly women and their driver must fend for themselves when their tour bus breaks down in the remote Canadian countryside. By the end of the film, we’ve gotten to know all of these ladies and their complex lives while admiring their capacity for surviving and even thriving in the rough. With neither a youngster nor a man among them, these strangers fend for themselves with aplomb.

‘Tatie Danielle’
Contentious oldsters don't get more wickedly manipulative and black-hearted than the downright bitchy protagonist of this pitch-black French comedy. The sour Danielle (Tsilla Chelton) is in perfect health, but she pretends to be ailing to push around everyone unfortunate enough to be in her orbit. One day, of course, she meets a minder who actually calls her bluff, and the war is on. Please, Miramax or whoever owns the rights to this film these days, release this brilliantly acrid and hilarious character study on DVD.

‘Umberto D.’ and ‘Everybody’s Fine’
Both of these stories about Italian pensioners are tragedies, but of different magnitudes. Director Vittorio De Sica’s classic “Umberto D.” follows the downward spiral of an elderly man whose cruel landlady makes life impossible for him and for his devoted dog. (This film was definitely an influence on last year’s heartrending “Wendy and Lucy.”) “Everybody’s Fine,” Giuseppe Tornatore’s follow-up to the sentimental “Cinema Paradiso,” sends a retired bureaucrat around Italy to visit his grown children, only to discover that his idyllic reminiscences about their childhoods don’t mesh with his kids’ less warm-and-fuzzy memories.

‘Wild Strawberries’
Perhaps the greatest film ever made about aging, Ingmar Bergman’s drama follows a longtime professor (played by legendary filmmaker Victor Sjöström) on a trip through Sweden to collect an award from a university. His itinerary takes him through the key locales of his life, making the journey figurative as well as literal. Disappointment and regret stand alongside pride and nostalgia, and the result is powerful enough to banish all of cinema’s inane rapping grannies and grumpy old men from your memory.

Follow msnbc.com Movie Critic Alonso Duralde at http://www.twitter.com/MSNBCalonso.

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