Impact Reviews Recommends

REVIEWS Impact Reviews Recommends Impact Reviews Recommends

The Impact Reviews team provide freshers with their two top film and book recommendations to ensure those fretful first years never run out of cultural conversation content.

Lost in Translation (2003)

Directed by Sofia Coppola

When beginning university, it’s natural to feel lonely and isolated as you’ve left home, likely for the first time. And with that can come a sense of confusion and uncertainty, both of yourself and who you want to be. Young Yale University graduate Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and middle-aged American actor Bob (Bill Murray) share these emotions and form a tender platonic relationship. With both characters being at such different stages in their life, but sharing the same internal struggles, the film has an incredibly therapeutic quality; it reassures us that we are not alone in being alone.

Alex Watkin

The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s 1994 debut novel, recounts the tale of a group of misfit classicists studying at the fictional Hampden College, based on the real-life Bennington College which Tartt attended. Despite the outlandish plot (a kind of reverse whodunnit), a lot of the small details of university life ring true, and it’s easy to lose yourself wandering around this ethereal college in the New England mountains. If you’re a classics student, you’ll appreciate the mythological references woven through the book and the occasional Greek or Latin aphorism scattered across the pages. But even if you don’t understand a word of Greek (like me), you’ll hopefully still find this book – an admittedly long one at over 500 pages - just as captivating as I did.

Kit Sinclair

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernadine Evaristo

Joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 and Bernadine Evaristo’s eighth novel, Girl, Woman, Other is a collection of 12 short stories which weave together the varied experiences of Black and British women in the contemporary United Kingdom. These are stories of students, playwrights, teachers, farmers, mothers and above all, women, whose tales are collected into groups of three within which their lives interconnect. Yet, almost all the characters cross paths with each other in different (sometimes surprising) ways. The prose is fluid and easy to read and, if you’re not a dedicated reader, each story can be read as a stand-alone narrative to prevent having to tackle the whole book at once.

Kit Sinclair

Boyhood (2014)

Directed by Richard Linklater

Boyhood does exactly what is says on the tin – it follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the age of six, living in a small town in Texas, to his first day of university. The film is one of the most ambitious coming-of-age films ever made as it was shot over a 12-year-period. Seeing the actors age throughout the film is an unquestionably profound spectacle. The first half of the film is the strongest, as Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) must adapt to the divorce of their parents. Later portions can be a little unspecific, falling prey to becoming a checklist of generic teenage boy moments, but overall, the film remains distinctive enough. In some ways, nothing much happens, but that is kind of the point. We grow up almost by accident – “the moment seizes us.”

Alex Watkin

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