'The Other Side of the Street': An elegant essay on growing older
by Eleanor Ringel Gillespie

It takes an extraordinary actress to play an ordinary woman. Fernanda Montenegro (an Oscar nominee for 1998's "Central Station") is one such actress, and her performance as Regina, a lonely woman in her mid-60s living in Rio, is exemplary. Regina isn't, perhaps, so much ordinary as she is average. She's emblematic of so many older women who find themselves becoming invisible as a youth-obsessed culture either blithely ignores them or tactfully turns its head the other way. Age isn't becoming — nowhere more than the flesh-fixated world of Rio. When Regina dolls herself up — lipstick and leather pants — and heads for a dance club where everyone is at least a quarter of a century younger than she is, you brace yourself. Read the full review