Film · Prime Video · 1986

An American Tail

Immigration as a family trying not to lose the child. Earnest and on their side.

The Mousekewitzes leave a pogrom, not a mood. Fievel falls off the ship and spends the film trying to rejoin a mother and a father who did not abandon him. The new world has cats, con men, and a labor that is not the postcard. The hope is not canceled. It is made specific: a family in one place.

Sentimental, and the sentiment is attached to the right object. A child can watch it. An adult who has ever lost sight of a small person in a crowd will recognize the pitch of the voice.

The eight

Industry
6/10
A new country means work, not a parade.
Household
9/10
The entire plot is parents and a child finding each other.
Piety
5/10
They leave because of a violence against their people. Faith is in the journey, not a speech.
Courage
8/10
A small mouse keeps looking.
Republic
6/10
The new shore has solidarity and it has swindlers.
Temperance
6/10
The con is condemned.
Truth
7/10
The promise of the new land is tested against a missing child.
Stewardship
9/10
Getting him back is worth more than the dream.

Live historicallyIf you have brought a family across anything, count heads before you count prospects.

Film · Prime Video · 1989

Glory

Keep it for older teens and adults. The dignity is in the training and the choice to go.

The soldiers are not a chorus behind a white officer's growth, though the film sometimes frames them that way and you should say so. Trip, Shaw, Rawlins, and the drill are the substance: pay refused until it is equal, shoes, the lash, the argument between rage and discipline. The fort at the end is slaughter in the service of a true cause, and the film does not cut to a celebration. A house can bear this if it will not turn it into a highlight.

Watch it once, seriously. The charge afterward is not a speech about how far we have come. It is attention to the men who were asked to prove a humanity that was not the army's to award.

The eight

Industry
8/10
Drill, the making of a regiment.
Household
4/10
Brothers in arms. Little domestic peace.
Piety
5/10
A cause with a moral weight. Shaw's duty.
Courage
9/10
They go up the beach.
Republic
8/10
A republic arming men it had enslaved, and still cheating them.
Temperance
6/10
Fury governed into a unit.
Truth
8/10
The unequal pay is not skipped.
Stewardship
8/10
It hands on the regiment, not the poster.

Live historicallyDo not cheer a battle you would not be willing to tell truthfully, including who was paid less.