February & March 2024: Best first reads & viewings

FEBRUARY

Best first reads:

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015)

Best first viewings:

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)
The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955)
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)
The Reluctant Debutante (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003)
Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
Sharp Objects (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2018)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

MARCH

Best first reads:

Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956)
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956)
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970)
New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, by Faye Ringel (1995)
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021)
The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead, by Faye Ringel (2022)
The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)
Agony’s Lodestone, by Laura Keating (2023)

Best first viewings:

The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Mogambo (John Ford, 1953)
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958)
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
The 4th Man (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016)
The Staircase (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, 2018)
I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter (Erin Lee Carr, 2019)
Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024)
Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024)