Ithaca
- warm
- measured
- gentle
- tender
Warm, measured, gentle drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, tender, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →In a small town in California's San Joaquin Valley, 14-year-old Homer Macauley is determined to be the best and fastest bicycle telegraph messenger anyone has ever seen. His older brother has gone to war, leaving Homer to look after his widowed mother, his older sister and his 4-year-old brother, Ulysses. And so it is that as spring turns to summer, 1942, Homer Macauley delivers messages of love, hope, pain... and death... to the good people of Ithaca. And Homer Macauley will grapple with one message that will change him forever - from a boy into a man. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan's 1943 novel, The Human Comedy, ITHACA is the quintessential wartime tale of the Home Front. It is a coming-of-age story about the exuberance of youth, the sweetness of life, the sting of death and the modesty and sheer goodness that lives in each and every one of us.
Our read · Ithaca (2015) reads as a warm, measured, grounded drama entry — gentle in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, tender in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Ithaca
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a gentle coming-of-age story delivering telegrams in small town WWII America.”
Skip it tonight — You want excitement or anything fast-moving or modern.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
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