Movies

  • Om Shanti Om

    • Rating: PG/PG-13 range — check your streaming service for its listed rating

    • Synopsis: A struggling Bollywood actor falls in love with a famous actress, meets a tragic end, and gets another shot at love—and revenge—when he's reincarnated as a movie star decades later. It's romantic, ridiculous, dramatic, colorful, and packed with enormous musical numbers.

    • Heads-up: Murder, fire, death, and some spooky/intense moments.

  • Inside out 1 and 2

    • Inside out 1: Rated PG

      • What it's about: When 11-year-old Riley moves to a new city, the emotions inside her mind—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust—try to help her navigate a huge life change. Things get complicated when Joy discovers that keeping Riley happy all the time might not actually be what's best for her.

      • Good to know: Deals with sadness, loneliness, family stress, and a child struggling emotionally after a major transition. There are a few mildly scary or intense moments.

    • Inside out 2: Rated PG

      • What it's about: Riley is now 13, and puberty brings some unexpected renovations to Headquarters—and several new emotions. Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui arrive just as Riley is trying to figure out friendships, belonging, and who she wants to be.

      • Good to know: Explores anxiety, self-doubt, social pressure, changing friendships, and a panic-like episode. Especially relatable for tweens, teens, and anyone whose Anxiety has ever confidently announced that she has developed a very thorough plan.

  • The Scout

    • Rated PG-13

    • What it's about: A down-on-his-luck baseball scout travels to Mexico and discovers Steve Nebraska, an astonishingly talented—and wonderfully eccentric—young baseball player played by Brendan Fraser. Bringing Steve to the major leagues turns out to be the easy part; helping him navigate fame, relationships, and the parts of his past he's carrying with him is considerably more complicated.

    • Good to know: A quirky 1990s sports comedy with some surprisingly tender moments underneath the absurdity. It includes adult language and humor, references to childhood trauma and family dysfunction, and themes related to mental health and emotional distress.

    • From Sonya’s shelf: I love this movie and I used it as a case study for PTSD during grad school. As a note since it needs to be said for legal reasons, do not diagnose yourself using this movie, but you can notice how someone’s behavior that might seem strange or confusing, can make perfect sense once you understand the context.

  • Guardians of the Galaxy

    • Rated PG-13

    • What it's about: A group of deeply imperfect space misfits—including a homesick human, a deadly assassin, a very literal warrior, a talking raccoon, and a tree with a limited vocabulary—somehow become a family while repeatedly finding themselves responsible for saving the galaxy.

      Across three movies (plus appearances elsewhere in the Marvel universe), Guardians of the Galaxy mixes huge sci-fi adventures with an enormous amount of heart. They're funny, weird, colorful, and held together by fantastic music—but what makes the Guardians so lovable is how much they come to care for one another. These are people carrying grief, trauma, abandonment, anger, and complicated histories who slowly create a place where they belong.

    • Good to know: All three films are rated PG-13 and include sci-fi violence, death, loss, language, frightening imagery, and some surprisingly heavy emotional material. The third movie in particular includes animal cruelty and distressing scenes involving experimentation on animals.

    • Why we love it: Found family. Excellent music. Emotional damage. A talking raccoon. ❤️

  • The Artist

    • Rated PG-13

    • What it's about: Set in Hollywood during the transition from silent films to “talkies,” The Artist follows George Valentin, a beloved silent-film star whose career begins to disappear just as aspiring actress Peppy Miller’s begins to take off. Told almost entirely without spoken dialogue and filmed in black and white, it’s funny, romantic, visually playful, and surprisingly moving.

      Underneath all that old-Hollywood charm is a story about identity, pride, depression, friendship, and what happens when the thing you’ve built your sense of self around suddenly changes.

    • Good to know: Includes alcohol use, depression, a suicide attempt, a fire, and some emotionally intense scenes.

    • Why we love it: Old Hollywood glamour. Tap dancing. A ridiculously charming dog. And proof that sometimes you don’t need words to tell a really good story.

  • Amelie

    • Rated R

    • What it's about: Amélie is a shy, imaginative young woman living in Paris who decides to secretly improve the lives of the people around her through a series of elaborate little acts of kindness. The trouble is, helping other people from a safe distance is much easier than risking vulnerability in her own life.

      Whimsical, strange, romantic, and visually gorgeous, Amélie celebrates noticing tiny things, finding delight in ordinary life, and figuring out how to participate in the world instead of only observing it.

    • Good to know: The R rating is largely for sexual content and some language rather than violence. There are sexual references and situations, brief nudity, death and grief, and some darker or uncomfortable moments mixed into the whimsy.

    • Why we love it: Crème brûlée. Photo booths. Garden gnomes with passports. Tiny acts of rebellion and kindness. And one wonderfully odd woman slowly discovering that she deserves to be part of the story too.

    • From Sonya’s shelf: I have watched Amélie more times than I could possibly count, and somehow I never get tired of it. I love the way it notices people—their strange little habits, private joys, fears, contradictions, and the tiny details that make someone unmistakably themselves.