The teenage film market has been around for years: teen romance, teen high-school drama, teen vampire movies. It has taken the industry longer to recognize the other end of life as a potential market, possibly because the themes producers most often associate with old age -- loss, illness, lingering death -- don't make a great movie pitch. But a number of films in the past couple of years -- Quartet, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Song for Marion and Amour -- suggest that the industry has finally discovered the 'grey pound'. There is even Robot and Frank, in which a retired jewel thief with dementia enlists the help of a robot companion to carry out a final heist.

With the exception of Amour, all of these films seem to have been made with an older audience in mind. They feature characters with time on their hands, retired from work and looking for something to counterbalance the down-side of getting older. Naturally that includes the approach of death but not in the sudden form we are familiar with from action movies, where baddies expire in a burst of automatic fire.

Obviously films about the final period of life cannot avoid subjects such as dementia and terminal illness, but it isn't as if that's the whole story of getting old in the 21st century. The process of ageing does not affect everyone in the same way and the unpopularity of lifelong marriage means that some adults are still forming new relationships in their 60s, 70s and even 80s. But this isn't easy material for an industry used to displaying the bodies of toned young actors, and movies aimed at an older audience struggle to find the right tone to deal with sex and love.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), seems able to countenance new relationships between retired people only in the setting of a grand but decaying Indian hotel. In an 'ensemble' cast of well-known British actors, the characters played by Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup come close to caricature because they are desperate for romance, while Bill Nighy and Judi Dench are so diffident that they almost don't end up together. The effect is to underline the film's discomfort with the notion of older, imperfect bodies experiencing desire.

'Ensemble' casts are a popular way of approaching the subject of age, presumably because an accumulation of stellar names is assumed to make up for the absence of the latest 'hot' 23-year-old. Dustin Hoffman directs Quartet, a movie set in a retirement home for musicians, and it features plenty of well-known faces: Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Andrew Sachs and Pauline Collins. The residents hope that the proceeds of a gala performance of Rigoletto will stave off the threat of closure but the arrival of Maggie Smith, playing the ex-wife of one of the other singers, throws the production into turmoil. Smith's presence and the setting in a Georgian-style mansion bring to mind the TV series Downton Abbey, while the opera plot is another pleasant diversion from reality.

This goes to the heart of the problem with the movie industry's engagement with ageing. For Hollywood and its less lavishly resourced British rivals, it seems that the experience of getting older can be touched on only in a context where the audience leaves the cinema with cheerful impressions. It may be that producers are nervous about getting old themselves. But not every older adult has cancer or dementia and an insistence on showing the plucky efforts of sufferers confirms the bad reputation of age in a youthobsessed culture.

Song for Marion, a film by the British director Paul Andrew Williams, has Gemma Arterton as a young music teacher relentlessly drilling a choir of elderly and infirm older folk who perform under the excruciating title OAPz. Vanessa Redgrave is the star turn, her sunny temperament undimmed as she expires from cancer, whereupon her widower (Terence Stamp) sheds the anti-social habits of a lifetime to sing in her honour at a choir competition. It's sentimental, redemptive and in toe-curlingly bad taste.

Despite first impressions, what's going on here is really a means of avoidance: glancing at the very worst aspects of old age and then finding something to cheer up the audience. It confirms the impression the studios are trying to avoid, presenting age as a battle against loneliness and infirmity, punctuated by desperate excursions into saving hotels and community singing.

It doesn't have to be like this, as Michael Haneke demonstrates in his Oscar-winning film Amour. This story of two retired music teachers, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emanuelle Riva, is the frankest meditation to date on the indignities of old age but its principal subject, as the title suggests, is love. Filmed in an increasingly claustrophobic apartment, there are no feel-good sub plots as Anne is painfully incapacitated by a series of strokes, but her husband Georges never forgets that she is the woman he has loved for so many years. It takes a European film, directed by an Austrian and with two great French actors, to remind Hollywood and its imitators that the elderly are first and foremost human beings.

Joan Smith is a journalist and author.

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Grey Market Films & Trailer | Emily Blunt and Colin Firth