Movie · Netflix · 2021

Nightbooks

Stories used to survive a captor. Real fright. Not a title that belongs in a preschool row.

Nightbooks respects a boy who writes, and it puts him in a genuine fright. That combination is for an older child who already likes a scare, sitting with you. It is misfiled among the bright tiles. Do not play it for a small child because the art looked colorful. The witch is the kind of captor this shelf usually turns into a song. This one does not.

The eight

Industry
5/10
Writing is the skill that keeps him alive. It is treated as work.
Household
4/10
He is separated from home, and home is what he is trying to deserve to see again.
Piety
3/10
A witch is a tyrant. No reverence, a real moral stakes.
Courage
7/10
He stays in the room and tells the truth in the story when a lie would be safer.
Republic
3/10
A private imprisonment.
Temperance
4/10
The scares are the point for long stretches.
Truth
6/10
The stories reveal him. That is an honest use of a story.
Stewardship
5/10
What he might hand on is a tale that tells the truth about himself.

Live historicallyOnly for an older child, with you in the room. Ask what the story admitted that he would not say out loud.

Movie · Netflix · 2021

Back to the Outback

A journey home. The lesson about looks is plain, and the home is the right destination.

Back to the Outback is an escape home, which is a better plot than an escape into fame. The ugliness lesson is delivered more than once, and children will not miss it. The part to say aloud is the destination: they are not trying to be liked by the crowd that feared them. They are trying to get back to a place where they can live. Fine for a family evening.

The eight

Industry
4/10
The zoo is a job done badly. The wild is where they have to learn to live.
Household
4/10
A made family of the rejected. They are trying to reach a real habitat.
Piety
3/10
Being seen truly is the hope. It is not quite worship of being seen.
Courage
6/10
They cross a country that can kill them.
Republic
4/10
A park that used them. A wilderness that does not.
Temperance
5/10
Jokes about ugliness, aimed at the people who flinched.
Truth
6/10
The fear of them was ignorant, and the film says so without pretending they are harmless in every way.
Stewardship
5/10
What they want to hand on is a way home.

Live historicallyAsk where they were going, and why being liked was not the arrival.