Romance Doesn’t Retire: Sex-Positive Films About Love After 60

When you picture a steamy love scene, who comes to mind? Be honest. It's probably not anyone with reading glasses on the nightstand, a heating pad within reach, and a half-finished glass of Sauvignon Blanc on the dresser. Hollywood still behaves as if romance has an expiration date, which is ridiculous, because older love stories have what young ones don't: range, lovers with baggage, hard-won self-knowledge, and the freedom of having stopped caring what anyone thinks.

The good news? When filmmakers do put older adults at the center of a love story, they tend to cast the absolute best actors. The eight films and one series below are my favorites and proof that sex, romance, and reinvention don't retire when you do. They just get more honest, messier, funnier, and far more interesting.

Book Club

(Image Source: Paramount)

This might be my all-time favorite. Four lifelong friends spice up their book club with Fifty Shades of Grey and then proceed to spice up their lives. The brilliance of this movie is that each woman represents a different version of later-life romance. Jane Fonda plays the glamorous commitment-allergic vixen with a penthouse. Diane Keaton is the recent widow whose daughters are organizing her move to live with one of them. Candice Bergen is a long-divorced federal judge giving online dating an earnest try. The scenes of her clerk overhearing her romantic adventures are worth the runtime. Mary Steenburgen is married to Craig T. Nelson, whose libido apparently retired the same day he did. Add Don Johnson, Andy Garcia, Richard Dreyfuss, first-date jitters, backseat make-out sessions, and a Viagra-related traffic stop that I won’t spoil but frequently replay in my mind and laugh. What sells the movie isn't the antics, though, it's four women pushing and supporting each other to make the next chapter the best chapter.

Something's Gotta Give

(Image Source: Columbia Pictures)

This is my guilty pleasure, and I'm not even guilty about it. Half the fun is watching Jack Nicholson play a version of Jack Nicholson as Harry, an aging music exec who only dates women under thirty. His current girlfriend (Amanda Peet) takes him to her mother's Hamptons beach house, and her mother Erica (Diane Keaton) unexpectedly happens to be there. Harry promptly has a heart attack and ends up convalescing under Erica's roof. Even though they’re leery of each other, their flirtation feels awkward, vulnerable, funny, and surprisingly believable. The other shoe drops when Keanu Reeves, as his improbably young ER doctor, also falls for Erica. Two men, one Diane Keaton, zero apologies. Nancy Meyers builds the whole movie out of very specific older-people comedy: shared reading glasses in bed, a turtleneck snipped off with scissors in a moment of lust, the Viagra-meets-nitroglycerin panic at the ER, and Erica's revenge play featuring a chorus line of "Dancing Harrys" in open-back hospital gowns waving bedpans. Also: the house. The house is a co-star. You’ll leave wanting white slipcovers and a writing nook with ocean light.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

(Image Source: Searchlight Pictures)

Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed religion teacher who hires a young sex worker (Daryl McCormack) and shows up to their hotel room with her written bucket list of five sexual experiences she wants to try. Her thirty-one-year marriage was, in her own words, missionary-only and she has more or less made peace that she’ll never have an orgasm. What unfolds across four meetings isn't really about the sex acts at all. It's about a woman in her sixties being seen, listened to, and treated as desirable, possibly for the first time in her life. The relationship between Nancy and Leo becomes an intimate exploration of aging, body image, shame, desire, and self-acceptance. Thompson's mirror scene near the end is the bravest thing I've watched a movie star do in years. The conversations are frank, the comedy is dry as a good martini, and somehow the whole film manages to be sexy and a sermon about self-worth without ever feeling like either. This is the sexual-awakening film I wish every older woman would watch.

Hope Springs

(Image Source: Columbia Pictures)

This is the film I keep coming back to, even though watching it can feel like accidentally overhearing someone’s marriage. Meryl Streep is Kay, a Midwestern woman in her sixties who has slept in the guest room of her own house for years and is finally, quietly, completely done. Tommy Lee Jones is Arnold, her curmudgeon husband of thirty-one years, who is roughly as enthusiastic about the idea of intensive couples therapy as he is about a root canal. Kay drags him to a small Maine town for a week with Dr. Bernie Feld (Steve Carell, in his most genuinely restrained performance), and the movie that follows is one long, uncomfortable, achingly familiar series of exercises in trying to remember how to want each other again. There is a scene involving a banana that I will not describe beyond it showcases Streep’s many talents. There is a movie-theater attempt that will make you cover your eyes. And there is one of the most honest on-screen portrayals of how decades of "we're fine" can quietly hollow out a bedroom and a marriage. It's funny in a way that hurts a little, which is probably the most accurate kind of funny for long marriages. Watch it with your spouse, partner, or the person you’ve been avoiding difficult conversations with since 1998.

Our Souls at Night

(Image Source: Netflix)

Full disclosure. I was hesitant to include this movie because it made me cry. But Jane Fonda and Robert Redford give such delicate, honest performances about the emotional realities of aging that I had to. What unfolds is a quiet, mature love story about vulnerability, gossip, grief, family complications, and the courage to open yourself up to connection after loss. They're widowed neighbors worn down by lonely nights when Fonda finally walks across the lawn and asks Redford if he'd like to come sleep with her. Just sleep. The movie moves gently from that arrangement into a real relationship of companionship, then friendship, then, eventually, sex again after years of nothing. The funny scene of the old men at the coffee shop teasing Redford about sex reminded me of seventh-grade boys in a locker room. Watching these two together on screen, fifty years after Barefoot in the Park, gray and unhurried and still open to it all, is its own argument for leaving the door ajar.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

(Image Source: Fox Searchlight)

Seven Brits with seven varieties of personal baggage answer a Jaipur ad for a luxurious retirement resort and arrive to find a hotel held together by paint, prayer, and the manager's relentless optimism. Judi Dench is a freshly widowed woman who had to sell her home to pay off her husband’s debts. Tom Wilkinson is a retired judge returning to find the boy he loved as a teenager, a storyline handled with real tenderness. Maggie Smith bringing her tired sighs and withering glances is there for a cheap hip replacement and an attitude adjustment, in that order. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are a dysfunctional married couple overinvested in their daughter’s business. Ronald Pickup is an unreformed lothario hoping his charm survived the flight. Celia Imrie is sizing up husband number four or possibly five, she's lost count and so have we. None of them came looking for love, sex, or a second act and most of them find at least one anyway. It’s the rare film that argues, gently and persuasively, that the worst thing you can do in your seventies is what you did in your fifties.

It's Complicated

(Image Source: Universal Pictures)

The premise sounds predictable, divorced couple accidentally sleeps together, but Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin manage to turn it into one of the funniest mature rom-com love triangles ever made. Streep is a Santa Barbara bakery owner, ten years divorced from Baldwin, who is now married to the much younger woman he cheated with. After an unexpected run-in and numerous martinis in a New York hotel bar after their son’s college graduation, Streep is suddenly the other woman in her own former marriage, and absolutely no part of her is psychologically prepared for it. The pleasure of the film is watching an older woman be wanted and pursued by both Baldwin and Martin and being slightly unhinged about it. The hotel-elevator scene, in which the future son-in-law slowly realizes his fiancée's mother is going upstairs with her ex-husband and he is the keeper of the “family secret,” is rom-com gold. What’s refreshing is how the film centers on an older woman being pursued by not one, but two men and she’s the one who gets to choose.

Not a Film, But a Mandatory Watch: Grace and Frankie

(Image Source: Netflix)

If you haven’t watched Grace and Frankie, fix that immediately. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are perfection as two wildly different women forced together after their husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, reveal they’re in love with each other and leaving them. Fonda is rigorous, controlled Grace and Tomlin is free-spirited, weed-friendly, kaftan-wearing Frankie. What starts as an odd-couple comedy evolves into one of television’s best portrayals of friendship, reinvention, sexuality, aging, dating, family, menopause, vibrators designed for arthritic hands, and learning that life can still surprise you no matter your age. The series is hilarious, smart, occasionally ridiculous, and surprisingly emotional. More importantly, it treats older adults as fully alive people…sexually, emotionally, socially, and romantically.

Your Turn

What I love about these movies and series is that they reject the idea that aging means becoming invisible. The characters flirt, fall in love, have sex, make terrible decisions, reinvent themselves, embarrass their children, get naked, get heartbroken, and try again. In other words: they keep living.

And maybe that’s what makes these stories so satisfying. They remind us that intimacy and desire don’t belong exclusively to the young. Sometimes romance gets even better with age, along with the wine, confidence, and refusal to waste time on bad sex.

So now I want to know -- what are your favorite romantic or sex-positive movies featuring older adults? Tell me in the comments. I’m always looking for the next one to watch with a glass of wine and zero shame.

(Image Source: Paramount, Columbia, Canva)