Stolen Summer

Chicago's suburbs in the mid-1970s. Eight-year-old Pete spends the last day of Catholic school being told by a nun to walk the Lord's path rather than the Devil's, and takes the instruction far more literally than anyone intended. His plan for the summer is to get somebody into heaven, and the somebody he picks is a gravely ill Jewish boy. Pete Jones wrote and directed it as the first film to come out of Project Greenlight, the contest Ben Affleck and Matt Damon set up; his script was chosen from roughly seven thousand entries, and HBO turned the shoot itself into a documentary series. Aidan Quinn and Bonnie Hunt play the parents, and the film arrived carrying the odd burden of having been watched while it was being made.