The Best Films to Show Kids to Get Them Hooked on Movies

During the pandemic, my family started a weekly Movie Night on Saturdays. (What else were we going to do? “Family Never Leave the House Nights” didn’t have quite the same ring.) Given my job watching and talking about films, I was quite happy with this development. And, to my pleasant surprise, this tradition has continued even as our social lives have returned.

My wife and I both had movies we wanted to share with our kids, but when you are watching a new title almost every Saturday night, you eventually exhaust the films you know and turn to other resources for ideas. I looked at a lot of “best movies to show to kids” lists, but found a lot of them lacking, and most of them extremely repetitive. It was as if they were all copied from the same central source, and possibly were written by people who didn’t have a lot of experience actually watching movies with children.

Well, I do. Like, a lot. After years of watching with my kids — two girls, for the record, both elementary school age as of this writing — these are the 15 titles I would personally say got the best and biggest reactions, along with the most requests for rewatches, or toys, or buying books to expand the experience of the films. I can’t guarantee your kids will love them; but I can promise you that mine do.