Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009) — PICK
Gandhi (1982) — PICK
The King’s Speech (2010) — PICK
The Natural (1984) — PICK

Among Amazon Prime offerings in December are a trio of classics and a delightful cartoon from two of the best animation filmmakers working — all with notable moral themes.

A 1995 Vatican film list honoree, Richard Attenborough’s Best Picture winner Gandhi is most notable for Ben Kingsley’s astonishing performance as an icon of nonviolence who inspired Martin Luther King Jr.

Tom Hooper’s Best Picture winner The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as England’s Prince Albert/George VI and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist Lionel Logue, is a charming ode to strong marriages as well as doing one’s duty.

One of the best sports films ever made, Barry Levinson’s The Natural, starring Robert Redford as a baseball prodigy, is a deliberately Arthurian tale of a Percival-like innocent led astray by temptation and ambition.

Finally, before Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Lego Movie, Chris Miller and Phil Lord made the witty, bonkers Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which intriguingly anticipates Spider-Verse’s complex father-son dynamics.

CAVEAT SPECTATOR: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: Mild rude humor. Fine family viewing. Gandhi: Deadly violence, including large-scale massacre; some religious issues. Teens and up. The King’s Speech: References to an illicit affair; therapeutic bad language. Teens and up. The Natural: Implied nonmarital sex; limited profanity. Teens and up.