Home Video Picks & Passes 01.06.19

Talking animals and Indiana Jones get thumbs-up.

(photo: IMBD)

Babe (1995) — PICK

Chicken Run (2000) — PICK

Leave No Trace (2018) — PICK

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) — PICK


Great films are coming your way this January. Family audiences are best served at Hulu, where new offerings include a pair of talking-animal classics about an outsider arriving at a farm: Babe, Chris Noonan’s brilliant parable about an empathic young pig on a sheep farm, and Chicken Run, stop-motion animation legend Nick Park’s nutty homage to POW escape movies, with Mel Gibson as a cocky American rooster on an English chicken farm.

Interested in artful, humane fare without a lot of harsh content? Check out Debra Granik’s extraordinary Leave No Trace, debuting on Amazon. A father-daughter story about a veteran with PTSD (Ben Foster) and his 13-year-old daughter (Thomasin McKenzie) living off the grid, it’s a heartbreaking but tender film leavened with small moments of kindness. Netflix viewers can enjoy Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling and God blowing up Nazis in Steven Spielberg’s iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

CAVEAT SPECTATOR: Babe: Some menace and animal violence; a single misuse of God’s name. Kids and up. Chicken Run: Some menace; fleeting mild innuendo. Kids and up. Leave No Trace: Mature themes. Teens and up. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Action violence; drunkenness; brief mild sensuality; limited profanity and crass language; gruesome images. Teens and up.

Edward Reginald Frampton, “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” 1908, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin.

Which Way Is Heaven?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s mystic west was inspired by the legendary voyage of St. Brendan, who sailed on a quest for a Paradise in the midst and mists of the ocean.