Film series will show ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ on Aug. 18

The wry, thoughtful comedy drama “Stranger Than Fiction” will be shown as part of the monthly Movies With Spirit series on Saturday, Aug. 18, at 7 p.m. at Woodstock Reformed Church, 16 Tinker St.

The film stars Will Ferrell as IRS auditor Harold Crick, whose mundane existence is interrupted by the sound of a personal narrator who knows and describes his every thought, feeling and action. At one point — after Crick’s always-precise wristwatch stops working and he resets it using the time given to him by a bystander — the narrator says, “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”

Stunned and worried by this prediction, Crick consults a psychiatrist, a Dr. Mittag-Leffler (Linda Hunt), who attributes the voice he hears to schizophrenia. Mittag-Leffler later allows that if the narrator were real — and if the way it describes his unfolding life seems somehow literary, as Crick suggests — then he should consider visiting a literary expert.

Crick visits Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). With Hilbert’s help, Circk eventually discovers that he’s the main character in a novel-in-progress and that the voice belongs to Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), an eccentric author notorious for killing off her main characters in creative ways.

The film’s trailer can be found on YouTube at goo. gl/Mv9m6S. The 2006 movie runs 1 hour and 53 minutes and is rated PG13. The Woodstock screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion. Refreshments will be served.

The Movies With Spirit series, organized by Gerry Harrington of Kingston, seeks to stimulate people’s sense of joy and wonder, inspire love and compassion, evoke a deepened understanding of people’s integral connection with

others and with life itself, and support individual cultures, faith paths and beliefs while simultaneously transcending them. The films are screened in diverse houses of worship and reverence across Ulster and

Dutchess counties at 7 p.m. on the third Saturday of every month. The series has no religious affiliation.

For more information about the series, call Harrington at (845) 389-9201 or send an email to gerryharrington@mindspring.com. Details are also available at movieswithspirit.com and facebook.com/MoviesWithSpirit.