By Christiane Steckenbiller

Walk­ing 1,100 miles in one con­sec­u­tive hike with a heavy back­pack – real­ly heavy, so heavy that you can hard­ly stand, let alone walk – might not seem like the most intrigu­ing activ­i­ty to most peo­ple. But for some­one like me liv­ing in Col­orado, a state con­sis­tent­ly viewed as one of the most active ones in the coun­try, this sce­nario hits very close to home. The Col­orado Trail, for instance, is a 486-mile hike (one way!) that runs from Den­ver to Duran­go. Peo­ple hike it. And they block off four to six weeks of their vaca­tion time to do it.

Cheryl Strayed had to take more time off than that to hike the much longer Pacif­ic Crest Trail. Known as the PCT, the trail runs from South­ern Cal­i­for­nia to British Colum­bia along the North Amer­i­can West Coast over the Sier­ra Neva­da and Cas­cade moun­tain ranges. Strayed wrote about her trek in her 2012 mem­oir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacif­ic Crest Trail, that topped The New York Times best­seller list and hit Amer­i­can movie the­aters this win­ter. Direct­ed by the Cana­di­an Jean-Marc Val­lée (Dal­las Buy­ers Club), with a screen­play by Eng­lish writer Nick Horn­by (High Fideli­ty, About a Boy), the film fit­ting­ly pre­miered at the Tel­luride Film Fes­ti­val in Col­orado. Reese With­er­spoon por­trays Strayed in a role that has gar­nered her anoth­er Acad­e­my Award nomination.

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By Maike Newman

It’s Feb­ru­ary, African Amer­i­can His­to­ry Month in the U.S. So let’s look at a fab­u­lous film that depicts a young black man and his pow­er­ful, but emo­tion­al strug­gle from a share­crop­per on a cot­ton farm to an invis­i­ble but­ler in the White House who lives by the max­im: “You see noth­ing, you hear noth­ing: you only serve.”

View­ers will soon come to real­ize that all they have ever dealt with in school his­to­ry lessons con­cern­ing slav­ery and the Civ­il Rights move­ment in the Unit­ed States hard­ly revealed the true tor­ments of African Amer­i­cans. So now get ready to embark upon a tru­ly thought-pro­vok­ing time travel.

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By Daria Radler

When Salomon Northup (Chi­we­tel Ejio­for) accepts a two-week job offer as a musi­cian from two white men with whom he trav­els from Upstate New York to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., he does not expect that the last evening spent in friend­ly com­pa­ny will mark the turn­ing point of his life. Beat­en, robbed, and scared, he awak­ens in a small cell the next morning—his iden­ti­ty no longer of inter­est or impor­tance. All of the sud­den, he is a sim­ple black man, a ‘nig­ger’ who is giv­en the new name Platt, a slave who appar­ent­ly ran away from his own­er in Geor­gia. He spends twelve years at dif­fer­ent plan­ta­tions in Louisiana, far away from his fam­i­ly and old life, doing hard phys­i­cal labor along­side oth­er slaves while still hold­ing on to his hope and belief of return­ing home one day.

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By Daria Radler

Hazel Grace Lances­ter will nev­er be a nor­mal teenag­er. She doesn’t know that peo­ple don’t do pot but smoke it, or what it feels like to par­ty the night away at a club with a fake ID. There is a swing set in her gar­den that hasn’t been used in years. Hazel was diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal thy­roid can­cer that even­tu­al­ly metas­ta­sized to her lungs when she was thir­teen. Her real­i­ty con­sists of con­stant­ly car­ry­ing an oxy­gen tank, rou­tine check-ups at the hos­pi­tal, watch­ing real­i­ty shows, and going to her sup­port group. While, at first, sup­port group sounds like the least enjoy­able activ­i­ty, Hazel soon meets Augus­tus Waters, who has lost his leg to osteosar­co­ma but is “on a roller­coast­er that only goes up.” They con­nect, they talk – talk a lot, about their dreams and fears, about books and obliv­ion – and fall in love grad­u­al­ly but nonethe­less intensively.

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By Friederike Fischer

We all know him—the tall, strong, brave man. The hero. The prince. The knight in shin­ing armor whose deci­sions are infal­li­ble, his visions wide-rang­ing, and his char­ac­ter traits impec­ca­ble. He is the good guy who faces the vil­lain. George R. R. Mar­tin intro­duces his read­ers to a new kind of hero: none of the above—at least not in the tra­di­tion­al sense.

A Game of Thrones (the first book of the series A Song of Ice and Fire) is about love and hate, loy­al­ty and trea­son as well as high-born lords and ser­vants. It is about a deeply trou­bled medieval king­dom on the edge of win­ter. It is also about good and evil, but the line between those two fades with every word that enters the reader’s mind and gets lost some­where on the 807 pages. There are more names appear­ing in the book than any­one could pos­si­bly remem­ber; yet none of the char­ac­ters can be clas­si­fied as entire­ly good or evil. No one is infal­li­ble. Not even—or espe­cial­ly not—the char­ac­ters that we would most like­ly call heroes.

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By Maryann Henck

After a three-year respite, icon­ic inde­pen­dent film­mak­er Jim Jar­musch is back with a qui­et­ly intrigu­ing new film: Only Lovers Left Alive – a tale of two lovers and of two cities. Although lovers Adam and Eve (Tom Hid­dle­ston and Til­da Swin­ton) – not the bib­li­cal cou­ple but nev­er­the­less, a cou­ple in the bib­li­cal sense – live in cities con­ti­nents apart, they have been togeth­er for­ev­er. Lit­er­al­ly for­ev­er since both of them hap­pen to be vampires.

Yet, they’re not the type of vam­pires you might be expect­ing for they have lit­tle in com­mon with either the shape-shift­ing, black-caped Drac­u­la types or the momen­tar­i­ly in vogue vam­pires from the likes of Twi­light, The Vam­pire Diaries, and True Blood. This is, after all, the quirky cin­e­mat­ic world accord­ing to Jar­musch who is known for his refusal to cater to any one spe­cif­ic audi­ence. His pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to make films that “tell sto­ries, but some­how in a new way, not in a pre­dictable form, not in the usu­al manip­u­la­tive way.”

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