Tonight
Ten for the evening
One to ten. Newest, most watched, highest on the Living Meter. Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Hallmark, Acorn, and Netflix.
Keep it. Imagination here is a way of telling the truth about a person's worth, not an escape from the attic.
Sara's kindness in the attic is the film's argument, and it is not cheap because the film lets her be hungry. Miss Minchin worships money and calls it standards. The other girls learn which authority is real. There is a softness to the ending that a strict reading of the book might resist, and the softness is a mercy for a child audience. The picture to keep is the one where she gives the bun away.
A young house can watch this whenever someone has started ranking the children. Rank is the villain.
Industry
6/10
Servant work, done without becoming the role.
Household
7/10
A lost father, a made family of girls.
Piety
5/10
A sense that every child is a soul.
Courage
7/10
She stays kind without an audience.
Republic
5/10
A school as a small unjust state.
Temperance
7/10
Want, governed.
Truth
7/10
She tells a truer story than the headmistress.
Stewardship
8/10
The bun is the heirloom.
Live historicallyTreat the child with the least as if the story about them were true.
Keep it for adults. Hope here is a discipline, not a poster. The friendship is the good.
Andy brings a skill into a brutal institution and uses it, at first, to survive and to get young men their exams. Red's voice is the moral ear of the film: institutionalization is real, and a man can be afraid of a door. The warden's piety is a counterfeit, bible and books and a crime. The escape is satisfaction the story has earned by patience. Do not turn it into a revenge fantasy. He leaves. He asks a friend to live.
Adults. Some of the prison violence is the point and some is more than you need. The scene to keep is the music over the yard, a beauty the warden cannot administer.
Industry
8/10
A craft used inside a cage, then for the men.
Household
4/10
Friendship as the household he gets.
Piety
4/10
False piety exposed. Hope almost theological.
Courage
8/10
The long patience.
Republic
6/10
An institution rotten from the top.
Temperance
7/10
He plays a long game without a spree of rage.
Truth
7/10
He maintains his innocence without a speech every reel.
Stewardship
8/10
He leaves a way out for a friend.
Live historicallyBe a friend to someone in a low place without making them your project.
Keep it. Authority, a second chance, and a game that stays a game.
Norman Dale wants control because he lost it once, badly, and the film does not hide the temper. Myra sees through him. The town meeting is a perfect picture of a public that confuses passion with ownership. Shooter is given a dignity that is not sentimental about drink: he is needed, and he is ill, and both are true. The last game matters because they have become a team that can run a play under noise, not because a miracle owes small towns a trophy.
A boy who plays anything should see the part where the stars are put in their place and then raised by being trusted. That order is the coaching.
Industry
9/10
Practice, fundamentals, a clock.
Household
5/10
A wounded man given a role. A coach who is not a father and learns something like it.
Piety
4/10
A moral seriousness.
Courage
6/10
He faces the town.
Republic
7/10
A town that has to let the authority stand.
Temperance
6/10
Temper is his risk.
Truth
7/10
The past is not erased.
Stewardship
8/10
It hands on fundamentals.
Live historicallyLet the person you hired do the job, or do not hire them.
A comic clock, and a real defense of how a family gets started. Keep it.
Marty McFly is a musician with a coward for a father and a disappointed mother, and the film sends him back to be the friend his father needed before he can be his son. The joke is a DeLorean. The stake is a photograph of siblings fading because a marriage might not happen. George has to hit someone, once, in public, for a woman. It is not a subtle beat and it is the right one.
The sequel-bait and the Libyan opening are of their decade. The center holds: a boy who sees his parents as people, and a father who becomes brave enough to deserve the house. Watch it with a teenager. Then tell the true version from your own street.
Industry
6/10
Doc's craft is invention. George's missing craft is courage at a lunch counter.
Household
9/10
The plot is the parents' courtship. The house depends on it.
Piety
3/10
A clock tower, not a creed.
Courage
8/10
George stands up. Marty goes back into a year that can erase him.
Republic
5/10
A small town with a bully who runs it.
Temperance
6/10
Biff is appetite with a car. He loses.
Truth
7/10
The parents are not myths. They are young and flawed and still the ones.
Stewardship
8/10
He spends the trip saving his siblings' existence.
Live historicallyAsk your parents one true story of how they met, and notice what it cost.
A working house, played for laughs, that still believes the house is the point.
Frankie Heck is tired, and the show thinks her tiredness is funny and honorable at once. That is rarer than it should be. The kids are odd, selfish, and still brought to the table. The father is not a punch line who vanishes.
Use it when the evening needs a family that is not rich and not ashamed of not being rich.
Industry
8/10
Frankie works. Mike works. The bills are a character.
Household
8/10
The Heck family is the whole show. They fail in each other's direction.
Piety
4/10
Church is occasional and not mocked as the enemy.
Courage
5/10
The courage is showing up to a job and a school play you cannot afford.
Republic
5/10
A small Indiana town. The institutions are tired and still there.
Temperance
6/10
The jokes are at the chaos of a full house, not at modesty.
Truth
7/10
It does not pretend the middle class is a brand. The car really will not start.
Stewardship
7/10
The children are the stake. The parents do not leave.
Live historicallyAfter it, do one unglamorous job the house has been postponing. Frankie would.
Duty, a crumbling republic, and soldiers who were manufactured. Older children. Not a cartoon because it is drawn.
The early episodes are battles. The series becomes something else: clones with names, a Senate that is lying, Jedi who are generals when they were supposed to be something stricter. Ahsoka's leaving the order is the grown hour. The war is the villain, including the side that thinks it is the republic.
Not for a small child. The body count is the point, and the point is that a free people can be walked into a slaughter by men who speak well. Watch the arcs about the clones and the Senate. Skip the ones that are only a lightsaber.
Industry
7/10
Soldiering is a craft. The tragedy is that the craftsmen were ordered from a factory.
Household
3/10
Almost no one has a house. Attachment is treated as a fault by the people who should know better.
Piety
5/10
An order with a code. The code fails the war.
Courage
8/10
They go back in. Ahsoka walks away when the order will not tell the truth.
Republic
8/10
The republic is the subject: how it votes itself into an empire.
Temperance
5/10
War as a habit. The better arcs are sick of it.
Truth
8/10
The chancellor is a lie sitting in the chair. The show lets you watch the room miss it.
Stewardship
6/10
What is handed on is a galaxy that lost the argument.
Live historicallyTell a teenager the difference between a soldier who chose the work and a person who was made for it.
The punishments are the old book. The factory is colder than the 1971 film. Read it that way.
Charlie is still the child who has a family and almost nothing else, and the ticket is still a test the other children fail in public. Willy is stranger here, and the flashbacks make his oddness a wound rather than a mystery. That is a choice. It explains him. It also risks teaching that genius is a loneliness the world should indulge. The book did not ask for that much sympathy.
Watch it if the house already knows the story and can say which child is which. The gum, the television, the greed, the spoiled demanding: those four are the lesson, and they are still true. Do not come away wishing to live in the factory. Come away glad Charlie had a grandfather who would go with him and a family to bring the prize home to.
Industry
6/10
Charlie's father is out of work. The cabbage soup is not a quirk.
Household
8/10
A cramped house that loves him. The grandparents are the wealth.
Piety
3/10
Wonder as a factory. No reverence.
Courage
6/10
He is brave in a quiet way: he tells the truth and he does not grab.
Republic
5/10
Five children, one prize, a public test.
Temperance
8/10
Appetite is the sin, demonstrated four times. Charlie's restraint is the point.
Truth
7/10
The children are not misunderstood. They are what they do.
Stewardship
7/10
He takes the factory in order to keep a family, not in order to become a brand.
Live historicallyLet a child want something, and then practice leaving one sweet uneaten.
Keep it, with the knowledge that it smooths a history. The locker room still has a true demand: play as one or lose.
Boone will not coach two teams inside one locker room. That insistence is the film's spine and it is right. The friendships arrive through work: a camp, a playbook, a hit you take for someone you did not eat with last year. The movie is neater than 1971, and a house should say so rather than pretend a sports picture finished racism. What it does not lie about is the necessity of a standard that applies to every boy in the room.
Watch it, then resist the warm credit sequence as a substitute for your own school's facts. The charge is local.
Industry
8/10
Practice as the moral method.
Household
5/10
Teammates become a household of a kind.
Piety
4/10
Little explicit faith. A real ethic.
Courage
7/10
Men who take the public heat.
Republic
7/10
A town forced to watch its children share a field.
Temperance
6/10
Anger present, mostly aimed.
Truth
6/10
The integration is real. The neatness is the film's.
Stewardship
7/10
It hands on a shared standard.
Live historicallyPut two people who do not like each other on a real job together.
The grump is right. The friendly visitors came for the eggs. Hear the grump.
Red is rude and isolated and correct. The pigs arrive with gifts and a party, and the island wants to be liked, and the eggs go missing. It is a comedy about a raid. The film trusts the unfriendly watchman over the welcoming committee. That is not the usual children's lesson, and it is the better one.
Crude in spots. The shape is sound. Hospitality is a virtue. Hospitality without eyes is how a fox gets the henhouse, or a pig gets the nest.
Industry
4/10
A court-ordered anger class. Then a real emergency.
Household
7/10
The eggs are the children. The whole plot is their rescue.
Piety
2/10
None.
Courage
7/10
He warns them and then goes after the ship.
Republic
6/10
A village that preferred a party to a watch.
Temperance
5/10
Anger is his vice and, aimed right, his tool.
Truth
8/10
The gifts were a lie. He said so early.
Stewardship
8/10
What is stolen is the next generation. They go get it.
Live historicallyWhen someone new is very charming around your children, look at their hands.
A house, a marriage, and a joke that stays kind. One of the better sitcoms in the row.
Sam and Jay cannot afford the life they thought they wanted, so they take the ruined house, and the ruined house comes with obligations. That is a sound comedy. The ghosts let the show remember that other centuries lived in the same rooms. It will not tell you what the dead owe God. It will tell you that a house is other people's story as well as yours.
Industry
5/10
They are trying to make the house pay. The inn is a plan and a chore.
Household
7/10
A marriage at the center. The ghosts are a difficult extended family.
Piety
3/10
The dead are stranded, not judged. The show is comedy, not a creed.
Courage
4/10
They stay with the house everyone told them to sell.
Republic
4/10
A local place, a history under the floorboards.
Temperance
7/10
The jokes are at manners and eras, not at the marriage.
Truth
6/10
Each ghost is a person from a specific time. The history gag is doing work.
Stewardship
6/10
Stewardship of a house is the actual plot, costumes included.
Live historicallyLearn one true thing about the people who had your home, or your street, before you.
