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After preteen Olive (Abigail Breslin) finds out she’s qualified for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, the rest of her family—harried mother Sheryl (Toni Collette); aspiring motivational speaker father Richard (Greg Kinnear); brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), who’s taken a vow of silence; Sheryl’s brother, Frank (Steve Carell), who recently survived a suicide attempt; and Richard’s father, Edwin (Alan Arkin, who won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for his performance), set out in a Volkswagen microbus together to get Olive to the contest, running into metaphorical roadblocks along the way.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004; free to stream for Starz subscribers)
As if breaking up with Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) isn’t bad enough on its own, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is further heartbroken to find out she has hired Lacuna Inc. to erase all her memories of him. A spiteful Joel decides to do the same to her, but regrets the choice even as the memories are in the process of crumbling away, eventually trying to hide the Clementine of his memory deeper and deeper in his mind where Lacuna’s technicians can’t find her.
You Can Count on Me (2000; free to stream for Amazon Prime members)
When Sammy and Terry were children, both their parents were killed in a car accident. As adults, Sammy (Laura Linney) is a capable single mother working in a bank. Terry (Mark Ruffalo) has been aimless…but comes to visit Sammy to rekindle their relationship, and also get her to give him some money, disrupting her orderly life in the process.
Music of the Heart (1999; available to stream for rent or purchase on iTunes)
Meryl Streep plays real-life musician and educator Roberta Guaspari, who recovered from the end of her marriage by starting a violin program that eventually expanded to multiple New York City public schools and taught hundreds of students. Keep an eye out for future Roman Roy Kieran Culkin as Roberta’s sweet son, Alexi.
The Hurricane (1999; available to stream for rent or purchase on Amazon)
Denzel Washington plays the titular character in this docudrama about Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter, a boxer convicted of triple murder in 1966. Decades later, a teenaged boy named Lesra Martin (Vicellous Reon Shannon) convinces his foster family to work on overturning Carter’s conviction after reading his autobiography, and the film portrays the process of revisiting Carter’s case.
Good Will Hunting (1997; free to stream for Hulu subscribers)
Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is a math genius who can’t resist sabotaging himself with pointless mischief and antisocial behavior. After solving a supposedly impossible problem on a blackboard at MIT, where he works as a cleaner, he gets arrested in a brawl; Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), who checked his arithmetic, gets Will out of jail by promising to supervise him, and get him therapy with Lambeau’s old classmate Sean Maguire (Robin Williams, who won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for the role).
Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995; available to stream for rent or purchase on Amazon)
Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) takes a job teaching music in a public high school to support his family while pursuing his true passion—composing—in his free time. His professional frustrations with his often indifferent students are not relieved when his son, Coltrane, is born deaf, and thus will not share Glenn’s love of music. But as we continue to follow Glenn’s setbacks over the many years of his career, we appreciate the impact he is having on his students’ lives, as he does not…until the moment of his retirement from teaching.
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