Kids' Movies That Parents Will Actually Like

A lonely ten-year-old in suburban California befriends an alien botanist accidentally left behind by his crew. Spielberg's film is the most purely emotional blockbuster ever made — it works by giving you a child's perspective completely and trusting that what matters to Elliott matters to you. The bicycle-across-the-moon sequence is one of cinema's great images. The ending will destroy you in front of your children, which is fine. They should see that films can do that. A masterpiece by any standard, children's or otherwise.

Paddington Brown is framed for stealing a rare pop-up book and sent to prison, where he gradually improves the lives of everyone around him through warmth, good manners, and an inexhaustible supply of marmalade sandwiches. Paul King's sequel is one of the most purely pleasurable films of the last decade — visually inventive, genuinely funny, impeccably acted by a cast that includes Hugh Grant doing the best comedy work of his career. It has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. More importantly, it is the rare sequel that is better than the original, which was itself excellent.

A newly hired night security guard at New York's Museum of Natural History discovers that everything comes to life after dark — the dinosaur skeleton, the Easter Island head, the Roman legionnaires, Theodore Roosevelt's wax figure. Ben Stiller does what he does best — flustered, well-meaning, slightly overwhelmed — and the film is stuffed with enough historical cameos and physical comedy to keep children genuinely engaged while offering adults the pleasure of a well-executed concept done without pretension. Robin Williams as Roosevelt is a particular joy. Good for a rainy Saturday afternoon with anyone over five.

Roald Dahl's story of a fox who outsmarts three horrible farmers, adapted by Wes Anderson using stop-motion animation and a cast including George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray. Anderson's visual sensibility — the symmetry, the colour, the deadpan delivery — translates beautifully to animation, and the film operates on two tracks with unusual precision: children follow the caper, adults follow a story about a middle-aged man who can't stop being who he fundamentally is, no matter how much it costs him. Funny, warm, and genuinely stylish. One of Anderson's best films by any measure.

A small waste-collecting robot has been alone on an abandoned Earth for seven hundred years when a sleek probe arrives and changes everything. Pixar's most ambitious film has almost no dialogue in its first thirty minutes and doesn't need any — the opening sequence, Wall-E alone among the towers of compacted rubbish he has spent centuries organising, is as purely cinematic as anything in the studio's catalogue. It is a love story, a science fiction film, and a quietly furious environmental parable all at once. Children love Wall-E. Adults find things in it that children don't yet have the vocabulary for.

The daughter of a Polynesian chief is called to the ocean to restore the heart of the goddess Te Fiti and save her people. Disney's Moana is one of the studio's genuine achievements — the Polynesian mythology is treated with unusual respect, the ocean itself is a character, and the music by Lin-Manuel Miranda holds up in ways that most Disney scores don't. Moana herself is a genuinely good protagonist: curious, brave, and motivated by something more complex than romance. The film is also visually extraordinary, particularly the sequences on the open water. Works equally well for a four-year-old and a forty-year-old.

A family of superheroes is forced to live in hiding in the suburbs, and the father — a former superhero now working in insurance — is slowly being destroyed by ordinariness. Brad Bird's film is a superhero movie for people who find superhero movies exhausting: the action sequences are spectacular, but the film's real subject is the specific frustration of being exceptional in a world that rewards mediocrity. Bob Parr's midlife crisis is rendered with more honesty than most films aimed at adults. The villain's motivation — if everyone is special, no one is — is one of cinema's great villain speeches and, arguably, not entirely wrong.

A nine-year-old boy in 1957 Maine discovers a giant robot from space and hides him from the government agent sent to find him. Brad Bird's animated film was a commercial failure on release and is now recognised as one of the finest American animated films ever made. The Iron Giant's central question — you are who you choose to be — is stated simply enough for a child and carries enough weight for an adult. The film's final act is one of the most emotionally devastating sequences in animation. Vin Diesel voices the Giant with almost no dialogue, and it is one of the great voice performances in cinema. Do not let your children watch this without tissues nearby.