Stolen Summer is a 2002 American drama film about a Catholic boy who befriends a terminally ill Jewish boy and tries to convert him, believing that it is the only way the Jewish boy will get to Heaven. Directed by first time writer/director Pete Jones, Stolen Summer is the first film produced for Project Greenlight, an independent film competition created by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and sponsored by HBO. Project Greenlight aired on HBO as a documentary series chronicling the selection of Jones's script from approximately seven thousand entries, and the production of the film in Chicago in 2001.
The film's casting department considered the casting of the Jewish Adi Stein as the Catholic Pete O'Malley to be an ironic joke, due to the characters attempting to convert a Jewish boy to Catholicism.
Plot
Cast
- Adi Stein as Pete O'Malley
- Mike Weinberg as Danny Jacobsen
- Aidan Quinn as Joe O'Malley
- Bonnie Hunt as Margaret O'Malley
- Kevin Pollak as Rabbi Jacobsen
- Brian Dennehy as Father Kelly
- Ryan Jonathan Kelley as Seamus O'Malley
- Eddie Kaye Thomas as Patrick O'Malley
- Will Malnati as Eddie O'Malley
Box office
The domestic total gross for the film was $134,726. Production costs were $1.8 million.
Critical reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 37% of 57 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Stolen Summer feels like a sugary after-school special stretched out to feature length." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".