The movie Philomena, starring Judi Dench and based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by U.K. journalist Martin Sixsmith (Macmillan U.K., 2009), received buzz at the Venice Film festival and is widely considered an Oscar contender. Originally set for a limited release on Christmas Day in the U.S., the date has been moved up to the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 22, expanding to more theaters the following week. The Hollywood Reporter states that the distributor, The Weinstein Company, sees it as “potent counterprogramming to more commercial fare” such as The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

The movie, directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen), stars Dench as Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who was forced as a teenager to give her child up for adoption and Steve Coogan as the reporter who helped her rediscover him in the U.S., fifty years later.

The book, which will be published for the first time in the U.S. as a trade paperback tie-in, titled Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search  (Penguin), with a foreword by Dench, was recently reviewed in the pre pub media. It got a strong thumbs up from Kirkus (“A searingly poignant account of forced adoption and its consequences”), and the cold shoulder from LJ (“Sixsmith’s narrative, while emotionally compelling, lacks context and verges at times on the sensationalistic, with invented dialog and narration”).

Below is the latest trailer:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 at 11:34 am and is filed under Books & Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.