The Week's Saturday Wrap
A bold new depiction of dementia, two world leaders team up, and the runner who raced for equality

 
FILM review

Familiar Touch

A woman with dementia adjusts to her new life.

“Movies about dementia tend to present it like something out of a horror movie,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. “But Familiar Touch is something more generous—an account of dementia not as an end but as a period of transition.” An “astounding” Kathleen Chalfant plays Ruth, an 80-something former cook who is moved into an assisted living facility by her son, whom she mistakes for a suitor. Sarah Friedland’s feature debut can be sad, “but it’s also salty and boundlessly tender—a decisive statement that Ruth’s life is not over, even if she can no longer keep living it the way she did before.” Chalfant, best known for her acclaimed stage work, delivers a performance “that feels at once utterly authentic and like the product of long experience,” said Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. In short, “a master class.”

As she adjusts to her new life, sometimes playfully, sometimes painfully, the film avoids sentimentalizing “what it can instead simply and honestly depict.” But while Ruth tries to treat her new situation as an adventure, this “quietly wrenching” film is, “unambiguously, a portrait of decline,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. At the same time, “Familiar Touch illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.” Devastating as it is to watch Ruth slip away, Chalfant’s performance remains “furiously alive.”

 
 
tv review

Heads of State

Here’s betting that Donald Trump and Keir Starmer couldn’t do this. In this summer-holiday-friendly new action comedy, John Cena plays a meathead U.S. president and Idris Elba a skeptical U.K. prime minister; they have to put aside their personal differences when enemies of the West blast a hole in the plane they’re sharing and they parachute into hostile territory. It’s all guns, fireballs, and quips from there out, and the two headliners are joined in dishing out mayhem by Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a crack MI6 agent and Jack Quaid as an additional ally who brings intense enthusiasm to the baddie-slaying. Wednesday, July 2, Prime.

 
 
OBITUARY

Nina Kuscsik

The runner who opened marathons to women

Running was still considered exclusively a man’s sport when Nina Kuscsik set her sights on a marathon. Many doctors in the 1960s believed distance running could render women infertile, and Kuscsik was a pregnant mother of two in 1968 when she read a book on the new craze of “jogging.” She took it up anyway and quickly got hooked. Just two years later, she became the first woman to run in the New York City Marathon—as a “bandit” with no bib—and the following year she finished second among female runners. Her prowess helped persuade authorities to change the rules, and in 1972, she and seven other women changed the running world forever by officially competing in the Boston Marathon. Kuscsik finished first among female runners, with a time of 3:10:26. “I proved it over and over,” she said. “My uterus didn’t fall out.”

Born Nina Louise Marmorino in Brooklyn, Kuscsik was an active child. A state champion cyclist, roller skater, and speed skater, she attended nursing school before marrying at 23. She “became a runner by accident,” said The Boston Globe, when her bicycle broke and she wanted to keep moving. She would run laps around her Long Island block, checking in on the kids once a mile and fielding puzzled looks from neighbors. “Kuscsik expressed impatience with those who questioned” her passion, said The New York Times. She credited running with giving her the confidence to strike out on her own, and she divorced her husband in the 1970s. As she continued to win races and evangelize for the sport, her advocacy got the Olympics to add a women’s marathon event in 1984.

Kuscsik “helped break open the boys’ club of long-distance running, challenging sexist attitudes and scientific misconceptions,” said The Washington Post. She ultimately completed over 80 marathons in four decades, setting her personal best of 2:50:22 in 1977. She also set a U.S. record for the 50-mile and won three races up the Empire State Building’s steps—all while holding down a nursing job at a Manhattan hospital. Later, after she gave up marathoning, she kept on cycling, sometimes riding 100 miles a day. “Seeing how many women are running marathons today, it just makes you realize you can change things,” she said in 2016. “Your body was meant to be used.”

 
 

Sunday Shortlist was written and edited by Susan Caskie, Ryan Devlin, Chris Mitchell, Rebecca Nathanson, and Matt Prigge.

Image credits, from top: Music Box Films / Everett; Amazon MGM Studios; AP