Acas, My Home (2020) — PICK

My Fair Lady (1964) — PICK

Open Range (2003) — PICK

 

Whether you’re a “Benedict Option” fan or a skeptic, the Sundance award-winner Acas, My Home — an engrossing documentary about a family leading a seemingly idyllic, marginal existence — offers rich food for thought and discussion.

In Romania’s Vcreti Nature Park in the Bucharest Delta, a father, mother and nine children live in sprawling wetlands amid chickens, dogs and pigs, running wild and dodging social workers. 

They’ve lived this way for decades — but the title shot, a drone reveal displaying first the vastness of their wild surroundings before exposing their proximity to the sprawling urban landscape of Bucharest, clarifies the fragility of their situation.

Director Radu Ciorniciuc leaves us pondering the knottiness of this crisis: Their way of life is unsustainable and in some ways debilitating, yet also beautiful, and there are no easy ways forward. (Now on Blu-ray; also available streaming.)

What else is out there? Netflix is now streaming the classic 1964 musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. And on Amazon Prime, Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall are solid in the laconic neo-Western Open Range.

 

CAVEAT SPECTATOR: Acas, My Home: Mature themes, language. Teens and up. My Fair Lady: Nothing objectionable. Open Range: Strong violence, profanity and crude language. Older teens and up.