Recommended for Families

These aren’t just movies that are safe for the kiddies. Some of these might have mature subject matter but I think they’re worth watching as a whole family.

Miss Potter

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The most common word used to describe a movie like Miss Potter is “charming,” a word that sometimes raises silent alarm bells with me. The British have another word: “twee.” According to Merriam-Webster, “twee” means “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint,” and, in order to succeed, a film like this has to walk that dangerously thin line between charm and “twee-ness.” Miss Potter walks it so adroitly, it feels almost effortless.

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Ratatouille

Ratatouille

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Okay, here’s the usual course of events that I follow with each new Pixar movie. 1) Hear concept. 2) Skeptically conclude that Pixar has finally blown it and there’s no way they can make this idea work. 3) See movie. 4) Offer up silent apologies for my lack of faith.

I’ll be damned if they haven’t done it to me again.

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Glory

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144 years ago this coming week, a Union regiment from Massachusetts led a futile assault on a Confederate bastion near Charleston known as Battery Wagner. As Civil War battles go, it was relatively minor and would normally go unremarked compared to the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, which both happened at roughly the same time. What made this action remarkable was the fact that 54th Massachusetts Volunteers was the first regular unit of the Union army to consist entirely of black soldiers, led by a white colonel, the son of prominent Boston abolitionists.

As an account of this event, Glory is reasonably accurate and thoroughly inspiring, built around a core of superb actors giving some of their best performances. It’s portrayal of Civil War combat is technically on par with the later Gettysburg, only more realistic and bloody, fully deserving of the film’s R rating.

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1776

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If the rest of American history would have had such great musical numbers, I might have gotten better grades. Okay, this adaptation of the hit Broadway play wasn’t exactly letter-perfect history but it is remarkably faithful to the facts for, you know, a musical. It’s also extremely entertaining if you allow for its stage bound origins.

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Cars

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So how does Pixar keep hitting these animated features out of the park? The Shrek franchise may have had warning track power and the original Ice Age was a sharp single up the middle, but Pixar keeps smacking them into the stratosphere like Barry Bonds in a ‘roid rage. And why I am using so many baseball metaphors for a racing movie?

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Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

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In the early seventies, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind successfully translated Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers into a pair of films, shot together as one. Despite being sued by several of the performers demanding payment for two films instead of just one, the Salkinds must have thought it was successful enough to attempt repeating the experiment when they adapted Superman for the big screen later that decade.

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Joyeux Noël

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The events of Joyeux Noël would scarcely be believed if the movie was a work of pure fiction. The greatest strength of Christian Carion’s film is that, if it were mere fiction, the film might actually make you believe the incredible events. The story is crafted carefully and the characters well-drawn, so that when the central event of the film occurs, their motivations and actions are believable within the context that they take place.

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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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C.S. Lewis’s much-loved fantasy cycle shares no small amount of DNA with J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Both were Oxford fellows who belonged to the same literary group, the Inklings. Tolkein was also primarily responsible for Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. The seven-part Narnia cycle is quite a bit more accessible than the Rings trilogy, however, and the movie version shares a similar relationship to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkein’s work. This is a Lord of the Rings movie for people who don’t want to sit through Jackson’s nine-hour trilogy.

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United 93

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Despite the highly speculative nature of the scenes set aboard the ill-fated flight, nothing about Paul Greengrass’s United 93 rings false. The heroics of the titular plane’s doomed passengers are not hyped-up or Rambo-ized, but carry a sufficiently believable air of fear and desperation to let you believe that, if it didn’t happen exactly this way, the real events were not far off.

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Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story

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Sired by Seabiscuit and Old Yeller, Dreamer is a journeyman pony with a lot of heart but not a lot of flash. Not showing us anything we haven’t seen before, it still runs a solid race and might even place or show on a good night. Okay, I think I’ve stretched that metaphor about as far as it will go without it snapping back and decapitating somebody.

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Pride & Prejudice

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Jane Austen’s 1813 novel has almost been anointed as the “mother of all romantic comedies.” Certainly, its plot, in which the two protagonists disguise growing affection behind barbed language and outward contempt for each other, is now a well-trod path and was so even in Austen’s day. Lizzie (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) are very much spiritual descendents of Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

It also has to be one of the most adapted novels in cinema history, with eight film versions, including this one, and three television adaptations. Joe Wright’s 2005 film manages to do a masterful job of compressing the novel’s plot into a reasonable two-hour running time. The movie manages to do justice to the film’s characters, Austen’s language and major themes within the confines of a feature length film.

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