Books and writing feature prominently in these films. No list would be complete without The Shining and Misery, but our other selections include book clubs, book stores, and just love of books and writing in general.
Wonder Boys
Grady is a 50ish English professor who hasn't had a thing published in years - not since he wrote his award-winning Great American Novel seven years ago. His college's annual literary festival fills the former wonder boy with self doubt and anxiety.
Mary and Max
Mary is a lonely eight-year-old in the suburbs of Melbourne. Struggling with questions that no one can answer, she writes to Max, an obese 44-year-old Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in New York City, which starts a friendship that spans 20 years and two continents.
Stranger Than Fiction
Kay Effiel is an author writing her latest novel. Her story revolves about an isolated man named Harold Crick. What she doesn't know is that her fictionalized character is real. Harold is an IRS agent who has lived a dull existence. One day begins to hear Karen's voice as she narrates what she is putting down on paper. Harold enlists the help of a literary professor to find out what is happening and ends up changing things about his life. He begins to have a relationship with his IRS client, a government-hating bakery owner named Ana Pascal. Harold, however, finds trouble when he hears that Karen plans to kill him.
Adaptation
Blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche, "New Yorker" journalist Susan Orlean, Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald. As Charlie struggles to adapt a best-selling book, he writes himself into the movie plot.
The Book Thief
The profoundly moving story of a girl who transforms the lives of those around her during World War II, Germany. Although Liesel is illiterate when she is adopted by a German couple, her adoptive father encourages her to learn to read. Ultimately, the power of words helps Liesel and Max, a Jew hiding in the family's home, escape from the events unfolding around them.
Saving Mr. Banks
When P.L. Travers travels from London to Hollywood in 1961 to finally discuss Walt Disney's desire to bring her beloved character, Mary Poppins to the motion picture screen (a quest he began in the 1940s as a promise to his two daughters), Disney meets a prim, uncompromising sexagenarian not only suspect of the impresario's concept for the film, but a woman struggling with her own past. During her stay in California, Travers' reflects back on her difficult childhood in 1906 Australia.
Trumbo
The successful career of 1940s screenwriter Dalton Trumbo comes to a crushing end when he and other Hollywood figures are blacklisted for their political beliefs. It tells the story of his fight against the U.S. government and studio bosses in a war over words and freedom, which entangled everyone in Hollywood from Hedda Hopper and John Wayne to Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger.
The Shining
A writer and his family are snowbound in a hotel and are haunted by either the hotel itself or the writer's dementia.
Capote
In 1959, Truman Capote was a popular writer for The New Yorker. He learns about the horrific and senseless murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas. Inspired by the story, Capote and his partner, Harper Lee, travel to the town to do research for an article. However, as Capote digs deeper into the story, he is inspired to expand the project into what would be his greatest work, "In Cold Blood."
Book Club
Four lifelong friends' lives are turned upside down when their book club attempts to shake things up by tackling the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey. From discovering new romance to rekindling old flames, they inspire each other to make their next chapter the best chapter.
Midnight in Paris
A romantic comedy about a family traveling to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple forced to confront the illusion that a life different from their own is better.
Fahrenheit 451
In a terrifying carefree future, Guy Montag, whose job as a fireman is to burn all books, questions his actions after meeting a young woman, and begins to rebel against society.
The Jane Austen Book Club
A group of six friends, in Sacramento, gather to distract themselves from loss - a newly dumped Sylvia, Prudie's repressed disappointment, or Jocelyn, who has a life of unrealized dreams. All are devoted Jane Austen fans, except the lone man, Grigg, who has an ulterior motive for joining the chick-lit gang. There's plenty of pride (Prudie), prejudice (Jocelyn), sense (Sylvia), and sensibility (Sylvia's daughter Allegra).
American Splendor
Pekar is a frustrated file clerk working at the local V.A. Hospital. He is also a comic book fan who befriends the young illustrator Robert Crumb and is soon inspired to create comic books based on his own life. Along his bumpy journey he meets, marries and falls in love with Joyce, an admiring comic book seller.
Freedom Writers
A true story about a teacher in a racially divided school who gives her students what they've always needed, a voice. Erin Gruwell comes to a southern California high school bubbling over with naive optimism. She quickly discovers that her unruly classroom is not easily won over by her good intentions. After a few floundering attempts to connect with her students, Gruwell gives them the assignment of keeping journals about their own lives, This assignment is something that the class can bite into with relish. This eventually bonds them together and pushes racial rivalries aside. Draws heavily from the published journals of the real students themselves.
You've Got Mail
A romance in which superstore book chain magnate Hanks and cozy children's bookshop owner Ryan are anonymous e-mail cyberpals who fall head-over-laptops in love, unaware that they are combative business rivals.
The Ghost Writer
When a gifted ghostwriter is hired to write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, he quickly finds himself trapped in a web of political and sexual intrigue. Lang is implicated in a scandal over his administration's harsh tactics, and as the ghostwriter digs into the politician's past, he discovers secrets that threaten to jeopardize international relations forever.
Barton Fink
A trendy playwright is trying to write a simple movie script, but to his misfortune has a bit of writer's block.
Misery
After an almost fatal car crash, novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself being nursed by a deranged fan who holds him captive.
The Bookshop
In England in 1959, free spirited widow Florence Green follows her lifelong dream by opening a bookshop in a conservative coastal town.