Movies from Natalie Portman

Carmen

A young and fiercely independent woman, Carmen, is forced to flee her home in the Mexican desert following the brutal murder of her mother. She survives an illegal border crossing into the US, only to be confronted by a lawless volunteer border guard. When the border guard and his patrol partner Aidan become embroiled in a deadly standoff, the pair is forced to escape together.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
So excited for you all to see @benjaminmillepied’s gorgeous new film Carmen with original music by @nicholasbritell and starring the brilliant actors.
Movies from Natalie Portman

Creed

The former World Heavyweight Champion Rocky Balboa serves as a trainer and mentor to Adonis Johnson, the son of his late friend and former rival Apollo Creed.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
The first time I saw @tessamaethompson in @creedmovie, I couldn't take my eyes off her.
Movies from Natalie Portman

Il Posto

With his family mired in financial troubles, Domenico moves to Milan, Italy, from his small town to get a job in lieu of furthering his education. A lack of options forces him to take a position as a messenger at a big company, where he hopes to receive a promotion soon. There, Domenico meets Antonietta, a young woman in a similar situation as himself. The two form a tentative relationship, but the soulless nature of their jobs threatens to keep them apart.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I want to celebrate the life and art of one of my favorite filmmakers, #ErmannoOlmi, who just passed. Watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Il Posto and tell me what you think!
Movies from Natalie Portman

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

The life inside a farm in Italy at the beginning of the century. Many poor country families live there, and the owner pays them by their productivity. One of the families has a very clever child. They decide to send him to school instead of make him help them, although this represents a great sacrifice. The boy has to wake up very early and walk several miles to get to the school. One day the boy's shoes break when returning home, but they do not have money to buy other. What can they do?
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I want to celebrate the life and art of one of my favorite filmmakers, #ErmannoOlmi, who just passed. Watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Il Posto and tell me what you think!
Movies from Natalie Portman

To Die For

Suzanne Stone wants to be a world-famous news anchor and she is willing to do anything to get what she wants. What she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in cold determination and diabolical wiles. As she pursues her goal with relentless focus, she is forced to destroy anything and anyone that may stand in her way, regardless of the ultimate cost or means necessary.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Last week, I rewatched the great movie #ToDieFor. Illeana Douglas is so astonishing in that film alongside the brilliant @nicolekidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
Movies from Natalie Portman

Crazy Rich Asians

An American-born Chinese economics professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore for his best friend's wedding, only to get thrust into the lives of Asia's rich and famous.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I can’t wait for the weekend so I can go see this movie!
Movies from Natalie Portman

Reversing Roe

Documentary that delves deep into the history of abortion law, revealing the contradictory ways in which women's bodies have been used to further political and ideological agendas.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
The landmark 1973 US Supreme Court abortion case #RoevWade is once again at a crossroads. Reversing Roe, directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg and produced by @evalongoria, is a timely depiction of the state of abortion and women’s rights in America. Looking forward to watching this on @Netflix. #FemaleFilmmakerFriday
Movies from Natalie Portman

Quincy

An intimate look into the life of icon Quincy Jones. A unique force in music and popular culture for 70 years, Jones has transcended racial and cultural boundaries; his story is inextricably woven into the fabric of America.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I feel so lucky to be able to call the brilliant @rashidajones my friend. She is the kindest, smartest, funniest, most talented friend a girl could ask for. And she has just added director to her accomplishments with the gorgeous film she made about her father, the genius @quincydjones, whom I also adore and am in awe of. Watch QUINCY, out today on Netflix.
Movies from Natalie Portman

American Son

Time passes and tension mounts in a Florida police station as an estranged interracial couple awaits news of their missing teenage son.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I was blessed to see @kerrywashington give one of the most moving performances I’ve seen in American Son yesterday. And then got to celebrate her with the genius @iamreginaking. Go see American Son now!
Movies from Natalie Portman

Psycho

When larcenous real estate clerk Marion Crane goes on the lam with a wad of cash and hopes of starting a new life, she ends up at the notorious Bates Motel, where manager Norman Bates cares for his housebound mother.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Thanks @cinespia for the most fun date night watching Psycho in the cemetery!
Books from Natalie Portman

Heartburn

Ein köstlicher moderner Klassiker über die Ehe, Verrat, Loyalität – und bittersüße Rache Im siebten Monat ihrer Schwangerschaft erfährt Rachel, dass ihr Mann in eine andere Frau verliebt ist und sie mit ihr betrügt. Die Tatsache, dass diese Frau einen »Hals so lang wie ein Arm und eine Nase so lang wie ein Daumen« hat, ist kein Trost. Aber manchmal ist Essen ein Trost, denn Rachel ist Kochbuchautorin, und zwischen dem Versuch, Mark zurückzugewinnen, und dem Wunsch, ihn umzubringen, bietet sie uns einige ihrer Lieblingsrezepte. Heartburn ist eine Achterbahnfahrt der Liebe, des Verrats, des Verlusts und – am befriedigendsten – der Rache.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Excited to finally read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, her classic transformation of pain into humorous art. Looking forward to hearing what you all think!
Books from Natalie Portman

Walden, Or, Life in the Woods

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, thus beginning the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. On the 150th anniversary of that event, Houghton Mifflin, successor to Thoreau's original publisher, is proud to publish a new edition of Walden, annotated by the distinguished Thoreau scholar Walter Harding and illustrated with Thoreau's own drawings. Even those who have read Walden many times will find much that is new in this edition, and those reading the book for the first time will discover why it has changed the lives of generations of readers.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Seems like a good time for Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: Life in the Woods — a reflection of Thoreau’s time living simply, surrounded by nature at Walden Pond.
Books from Natalie Portman

Foster

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the USIt is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
For our December pick, I’m excited for us all to read Claire Keegan’s Foster — the story of a young girl sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland while her mother carries another child to term in a house already bustling with siblings.
Books from Natalie Portman

Nothing Holds Back the Night

From the author of Underground Time, Delphine de Vigan, a novel based on her investigation into the life of her mercurial mother, in the wake of her suicide
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
For our January pick, excited for us all to read Nothing Holds Back the Night, an exploration of family secrets as Delphine de Vigan relies on interviews, recordings, and her own imagination to reconstruct her mother’s life, a woman who battled with mental illness and was largely unknowable to Vigan.
Books from Natalie Portman

Martyr!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.“Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” —Tommy Orange, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of There There“The best novel you'll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.” —Lauren Groff, best-selling author of Matrix and Fates and FuriesCyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
This book vibrates with love of life, beauty and language.
Books from Natalie Portman

Trust

WINNER of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for FictionLonglisted for the Booker PrizeOne of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of the YearThe Sunday Times BestsellerTrust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York.Can one person change the course of history?A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage. Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal?Composed of four competing versions of this deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.**Soon to be an HBO Limites Series starring Kate Winslet**'One of the great puzzle-box novels . . . a page-turner' – The Telegraph'Genius' – The Observer'Radiant, profound and moving' – Lauren Groff, author of Matrix'Metafiction at its best, unpredictable, clever and massively enjoyable' – The Sunday Times'Enthralling' – Daily Mail
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Our November pick Trust revolves around the Rasks, a secretive couple, and their rise to power during the Great Depression. Told through linked narratives spanning over a century, what begins as a novel shifts into memoir and autobiography as we seek to untangle fact from fiction. I’ve never read anything quite like this one — and I hope you’ll join me in reading this month!
Books from Natalie Portman

When We Cease to Understand the World

SELECTED FOR BARACK OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST‘A monstrous and brilliant book’ Philip Pullman‘Wholly mesmerising and revelatory... Completely fascinating’ William Boyd Sometimes discovery brings destructionWhen We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain.Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled lives we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I also loved Labatut’s last book, When We Cease to Understand the World, in case you haven’t read it yet!
Books from Natalie Portman

The MANIAC

“A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.” —The Washington Post “Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.” —Wall Street Journal “What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself.” —San Francisco ChronicleFrom one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AIBenjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Our October pick, The Maniac, centers around John von Neumann, the mathematician behind game theory, the atomic bomb, and a pioneer of AI. A fictionalized biography, Labatut’s novel explores the relationship between madness and reason.
Books from Natalie Portman

How to Love Your Daughter

How to Love Your Daughter
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Hila Blum's How to Love Your Daughter begins with a woman spying on her daughter and the grandchildren she's never met. I love the way Blum weaves in and out of timelines as the narrator examines memories and seeks to understand her daughter's estrangement.
Books from Natalie Portman

The Postcard

The Postcard
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Excited to introduce you to our May book pick — a saga of a Jewish family in search of home, written by one of my dear friends. When an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest home in Paris, including the names of relatives killed at Auschwitz, Anne sets out to discover who sent it and why.
TV Shows from Natalie Portman

Jane the Virgin

A comedy-drama following a chaste young woman who is accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination as she struggles to inform her devoutly religious family and make the right choices concerning the child. Based on the telenovela "Juana la virgen."
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I've loved watching @hereisgina in Jane the Virgin.
TV Shows from Natalie Portman

Westworld

A dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
The first time I saw @tessamaethompson in @creedmovie, I couldn't take my eyes off her. Now with #Westworld and #ThorRagnarok, she has continued to create indelible characters.
TV Shows from Natalie Portman

Transparent

An LA family with serious boundary issues have their past and future unravel when a dramatic admission causes everyone's secrets to spill out.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
By contrast, she rarely watches French TV, and indeed doesn't watch much TV at all, except to catch up with American shows on her computer (Broad City and Transparent are favorites).
TV Shows from Natalie Portman

Broad City

Broad City follows two women throughout their daily lives in New York City, making the smallest and mundane events hysterical and disturbing to watch all at the same time.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
By contrast, she rarely watches French TV, and indeed doesn't watch much TV at all, except to catch up with American shows on her computer (Broad City and Transparent are favorites).
Music recommended by Natalie Portman
13 songs

Natalie Portman's Favorite Songs

Natalie Portman made a charity compilation with some of her favourite songs. Enjoy the list!
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
Natalie Portman made a charity compilation with some of her favourite songs. Enjoy the list!
Podcasts from Natalie Portman

The On Being Project

Pursuing deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together. A nonprofit media and public life initiative.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Director
I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer on Krista Tippett’s podcast @onbeing and she spoke so poetically about how moss have survived so long by living humbly, using only what they need, and working together to survive.