It’s part of the reason we’re offering our 3rd annual MEA Film Fest in December in Santa Fe. But, I particularly appreciate films that have a midlife theme. Prefer the midlife chrysalis to the crisis. Here’s my top 10 list. What would be on your list?
1. Breaking Bad
Walter White’s midlife reckoning begins as a reaction to mortality but evolves into a brutal confrontation with ego, pride, and suppressed ambition. It’s a masterclass in what happens when a midlife awakening turns into shadow expression instead of self-awareness. Of course, the New Mexico location is appealing to MEA given we have a campus there. Walter White could have used MEA!
2. American Beauty
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is numbed by suburban ennui and detonates his life in pursuit of feeling alive again. Beneath the satire is a quiet question: what if the crisis isn’t desire, but disconnection from self?
3. Lost in Translation
Two souls drifting through Tokyo embody the quiet loneliness that often surfaces in midlife. It’s less about dramatic reinvention and more about the ache of asking, “Is this all there is?” This film played in last year’s MEA Film Fest.
4. The Sopranos
Tony Soprano’s panic attacks are not just mob stress — they’re existential fractures. Therapy becomes the unlikely doorway into a man confronting the hollowness beneath power and control.
5. Middlehood
A portrait of being wedged between aging parents and launching children, where invisibility becomes the central tension. It captures the emotional compression of midlife with both tenderness and truth and we were proud to have it be one of our closing films (actually, an independent TV series) of last year’s Fest along with the filmmaker Michele Palermo and lead actress Elena Wohl.
6. Ramona at Midlife
Ramona’s unraveling is subtle — less explosion, more erosion. It’s the story of a woman who has done everything right and now must ask whether “right” was ever really hers. Our opening night film last year and we were proud to have the filmmaker Brooke Berman and lead actress Yvonne Woods with us.
7. Mad Men
Don Draper is the patron saint of midlife reinvention — a man who built a life on image and spends years outrunning his own emptiness. Beneath the suits and seductions lies a haunting question: if you can reinvent yourself endlessly, do you ever truly know who you are? I love that he ended up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur in the last episode, not an unusual place for those experiencing a midlife crisis.
8. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
Often framed as romance fantasy, but it’s really about reclaiming vitality and agency after over-identifying with work and responsibility. Angela Bassett and Taye Diggs are hotties.
9. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
A widowed retired teacher, Emma Thompson, hires a young sex worker not just for intimacy, but to reclaim a part of herself she never allowed to exist. What begins as awkward negotiation becomes a tender midlife awakening about agency, pleasure, and the courage to finally know one’s own body with a ravishing final scene. Was in our 2024 Film Fest.
10. Better Call Saul
Jimmy McGill’s slow transformation reveals the midlife ache of unrealized potential. It’s a study in how identity hardens when self-doubt goes unexamined. Also, primarily shot in New Mexico. Now you know why we opened a campus outside Santa Fe.
-Chip