• Seven Pounds – Wracked with guilt over his wife’s accidental death, the main character makes detailed plans to kill himself. The film’s climactic ending is not for the feint of heart.
• Synecdoche, New York – Following a string of flawed relationships and an attempt to create a grand work of art, a man comes face to face with his own mortality.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Button is the story of a man moving toward his own inevitable demise, knowing exactly how much time he has left.

Unlike countless other movies over the years that have featured death as a central part of a story’s plot, these movies, as well as television programs like HBO’s award-winning series Six Feet Under, contemplate death for its own sake. In doing so, they present death in a new light that underscores the meaning as well as the inevitability of death.

It certainly appears that the movie-going public is ready to embrace films that have death as their central theme, with Benjamin Button alone reporting box-office earnings of more than $110 million dollars.

And why has death finally come out of the closet, so to speak? Perhaps it’s because more than 20% of Americans – the largest proportion in history –are now over the age of 65, bringing discussions of aging and mortality to the forefront.