A group of people witnessing the same event will often have similar memories of it, but the cortical representations of these memories are not well studied. Participants in this study were scanned using functional MRI while watching a movie and also when recalling the movie. Patterns of activity in high-level cortical areas that occurred when viewing events in the movie were similar to those that occurred when recalling the same events. Moreover, these patterns were broadly similar across individuals, suggesting that different people's brains respond in a similar way to visual stimuli.