Looking for a movie to watch? Sue Sorensen has some suggestions for you.
Sorensen, an English professor at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, is featured in a series of five short videos CMU posted to its YouTube channel earlier this month.
Each video features a film that Sorensen recommends watching, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Everyone has their own needs, their own ways of engaging with film—to simulate, to entertain, to soothe,” she says in the first video. “My own feeling is that good films for this time persuade me to see matters in a new light, and to encourage humane and calm responses to uncertain situations.”
Watch the five videos below.
Spotlight (2015)
Directed by Tom McCarthy
“This is a sober, sturdy, regular-folks-kind-of film that happens to celebrate some of the smartest investigative reporting in the history of newspapers.”
Speed (1994)
Directed by Jan de Bont
“Like us, the bus passengers of Speed are confined inside a problem they can’t fully understand, and they need to trust one another and behave decently.”
Paterson (2016)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
“When the tiny, ordinary moment of crisis occurs in this movie, the audience will find that their notions of suspense and meaning have altered.”
Key Largo (1948)
Directed by John Huston
“The film’s appeal is not only in John Huston’s well-crafted atmosphere of vaguely understood menace, but also in the precisely-drawn lines of association and relation, and the strange loyalties among the characters.”
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“This bittersweet romance… fills a need we often have for sad stories; sad stories that aren’t tragic or heartbreaking, but somehow in their handsome thwartnedess, fitting and strangely lovely.”
What movies have you been watching during the COVID-19 pandemic that you recommend to others? Let us know in the comments.
Do you have a video we should see? Email submit@canadianmennonite.org.
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More videos:
Watch: Winter Hour debuts “Letters”
Watch: Illustrating social action
Watch: New video highlights thrift shop’s impact
"Everyone has their own needs, their own ways of engaging with film..." (Image by Jan Vašek/Pixabay)
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