2018 Movies for Grownups Award Winners

Winners of this year's Movies for Grownups Awards are a diverse group.  From veteran actor Glenn Close's mesmerizing performance as a wife who is overshadowed by her Nobel Prize-winning husband to Richard E. Grant's witty and wonderful portrayal of a forger's partner in crime, to director Peter Farrelly's perfect touch at the helm of Green Book, there was much work to honor in the stories by filmmakers over 50. 

Best Movie for Grownups: Green Book

Far-fetched yet fact-based, the film is about elitist jazz genius Don Shirley, who hires beefy Copacabana nightclub bouncer Tony "Lip" Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard on a 1962 tour of the Deep South. The trip makes them fast friends despite differences in culture and race, and exemplifies the kind of smart, socially aware, emotionally absorbing, mature-actor-starring feature the Movies for Grownups Awards were founded to recognize. It’s also the feel-good movie of the year. 

Best Actress: Glenn Close (The Wife)

At 71, the seven-time Oscar nominee who calls herself “a late bloomer” does a career-capstone performance as the smarter, neglected spouse of the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, who owes her a literary debt greater than the one Thomas Wolfe owed Max Perkins. Film fans are forever in her debt: Her subtle, blazing, amazing performance evokes the depths of a long marriage and dramatizes society’s nasty habit of sidelining gifted women, especially as they age. Her expert face registers multiple emotions like a pond caressed and troubled by shifting winds.

Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)

Not even Lord of the Rings  star Mortensen was sure he could play a 1960s Italian American nightclub bouncer and bodyguard. In fact, he turned the role down, until the director convinced him he could pull it off — as he does, at least as well as John Travolta or Al Pacino could have done. He vindicates an idea at the core of Movies for Grownups: that talents can improve with age. Mortensen, 60, told AARP that such a role would have been tougher in his youth: “I think you have to be a certain age. As you get older, you definitely learn something.”

Best Supporting Actress: Judi Dench (All Is True)

At 23, when she won her first fame as a Shakespearean stage great, a film director told Dench that she’d never make it in movies. She did become a movie star at 63, in 1997’s Mrs. Brown, and 170 major film honors (including the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love) soon proved that guy a buffoon. At 84, her star has never shone brighter than when she plays Mrs. Shakespeare, mending her marriage by a flickering fire.