Canal+ Polska, 2013; Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski; Starring Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska; PG-13. Summary: A young Polish woman named Anna is told to visit and meet her only living relative, an aunt, before Anna takes her vows to become a nun. Anna’s aunt is...
Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013; Directed by Alfonso Cuarón; Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney; PG-13. Summary: Gravity is hailed as a film for its technical brilliance. Its opening shot is twelve and a half minutes long; when filming began, the technology did...
Miramax Films, 2008; Directed by John Patrick Shanley; Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis; PG-13. Summary: Set in the Bronx in 1964, this story begins at a time of transition for America. Kennedy was shot in ‘63, Vatican II nears...
United Artists, 2005; Directed by Bennett Miller; Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, and Chris Cooper; R. Summary: Capote is the true story of the famous (and infamous) writer Truman Capote; more specifically, the film chronicles the genesis and...
IFC Films, 2014; Directed by Richard Linklater; Starring Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, & Lorelei Linklater; R. Summary: The tagline of Boyhood is “12 years in the making,” a fitting phrase for a project that began filming in 2002 with a...
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959; Directed by William Wyler; Starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, & Hugh Griffith; G. Summary: The production company MGM—think of the roaring lion—was going bankrupt and invested an unprecedented amount of...
By: Zora Neale Hurston (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1937) Summary: One of the preeminent writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, the first novel to ever feature a black female protagonist. Set in Florida in the...
Shūsaku Endō, trans. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1969) Summary: In early seventeenth-century Japan, when Christians were ruthlessly persecuted and even crucified, some chose to apostatize by stepping on a fumie, an icon bearing Jesus’s image. Seeing one of...
By: Bernhard Schlink (New York: Pantheon, 1997) Summary: “I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that…. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was...
By: Barbara Kingsolver (New York: HarperCollins, 1998) Summary: The five members of the Price family—Nathan, Orleanna, and their four daughters—move to the Belgian Congo in 1959, leaving behind their home and belongings in Georgia, to act as Baptist missionaries to an...
