Upstream: Five films about the written word to stream right now
WITH tomorrow’s new movie The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society celebrating all things reading and writing, here are five more titles to stream about the power of print.
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With tomorrow’s new movie The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society celebrating all things reading and writing, here are five more titles to stream about the power of print.
ADAPTATION (2002)
Netflix
Five stars
A stunning, genre-smashing black comedy from the team behind Being John Malkovich (director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman). Nicolas Cage stars as a neurotic screenwriter fighting a losing battle to script a real-life bestseller by an equally neurotic journalist (a brilliant Meryl Streep). Blurs the lines between truth, fiction and bald-faced lies with innovative, breathtaking abandon.
FINDING FORRESTER (2000)
Foxtel Now
Three stars
A nicely inspirational affair. Sean Connery lets his famous double-malt diaphragm warble warmly, playing a reclusive author who has been hiding out in his New York apartment since his sole completed book received acclaim as the great American novel many decades ago. It takes an unlikely friendship with a young African-American neighbour (Rob Brown) to get the scribe to finally make up for all that lost time.
CAPOTE (2005)
Foxtel Now, Stan
Four and a half stars
A top-shelf biopic about the experiences of author Truman Capote as he researched his seminal work In Cold Blood in the 1960s. After gaining the confidence of a small-town community reeling from a family’s murder, Capote then bonds with the killers on death row. An extraordinary performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman lays bare the man who sold his soul for one hell of a story.
THE READER (2008)
Foxtel Now
Three and a half stars
A classy drama with a literary twist, charting the strange, strained relationship of Hannah (Kate Winslet) and Michael (David Kross). The pair conducted an intense affair in Germany in the 1950s, while Michael was still a teenager and Hannah was well into her thirties. In later years, after a terrible secret about Hannah’s past is revealed, the former lovers are still bound together in ways that are difficult to fathom.
THE GHOST WRITER (2010)
Netflix, Foxtel Now
Two and a half stars
There are powerful currents of claustrophobia, nervous tension, gallows humour and raw anguish pulsing throughout this mischievous thriller. Ewan McGregor plays the unnamed protagonist of the tale, a jaded journalist hired to polish the memoirs of an embattled former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan). Gripping stuff from director Roman Polanski (The Pianist). Co-stars Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams.
Originally published as Upstream: Five films about the written word to stream right now
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