Drawing fruitfully from a variety of storytelling traditions, including drama, cinema occupies a gray area between literary and visual art. For cinephiles, however, the observation that a movie “feels like a play” almost always operates as an insult, applied to films that lean too heavily on dialogue and too lightly on images to advance their plots and communicate their themes.

All of the movies in our September repertory series feel like movies. But famous playwrights wrote all of them.

Some of these dramatists enjoyed prosperous second careers in the film industry while others, after brief stints in Hollywood, retreated to Broadway. But each of the five succeeded at least once in bending the verbal talents that they’d honed in the world of theater toward truly cinematic ends, writing directly for the screen or adapting material that likewise didn’t come from the stage.

One of them — France’s Marcel Pagnol — became an acclaimed movie director himself. The other four — Clifford Odets, Harold Pinter, John Guare, and William Inge — had the good luck to team up with artists who knew what they were doing behind the camera: Alexander Mackendrick, Joseph Losey, Louis Malle, and Elia Kazan. We promise you’ll want to give each film a standing ovation.