Medicine Man (1992, rated PG-13, 106 minutes) is a completely predictable story about a man and a woman chasing each other as they close in on finding a cure for cancer in the deep jungle.

You can guess how it ends.

The real treasure of Medicine Man is watching Sean Connery create the very believable Dr. Robert Campbell character: a quirky, endlessly earnest, and somewhat sloppy bachelor who gets a bit mixed up when Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) shows up in his jungle laboratory to be his assistant. Campbell has discovered—and mysteriously lost—the chemical component of a cure for cancer. Crane wants to help him find it again, but she’s “a girl” and that complicates the quest. Campbell can’t escape the private and professional windmills that he fruitlessly charges, repeatedly. Crane very gradually realizes that adapting to a humanitarian mission in the deep jungle is not completely out of the question.

At the end, they’re happy about the way things turn out.

Stream Medicine Man through Hoopla

Stream the soundtrack to Medicine Man through Hoopla

Watch Medicine Man on DVD

Maybe you’ve never heard of this movie (or the 1954 book by William Golding). Try the book first. Its sustained drama shames the movie. Half of the movie is about boys in tattered clothing running through the forest—that’s not what Lord of the Flies is all about.

The briefest possible summary: a transoceanic flight loaded with young British schoolboys crashes near an uninhabited island. The surviving boys (no adults) struggle to create and maintain a primitive civitas. They fail. Their attempt at the simplest kind of self-government is wrecked by a cohort of boys who are persuaded by the charismatic, sociopathic Jack to indulge their inclinations to hedonism and barbarism. Ralph’s idealistic efforts (Piggy tries to help) to establish order are fruitless. Jack’s “hunters” end up killing two of their fellows before the grown-ups arrive to rescue them.

Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1963, not rated, 92 minutes) leads any defender of the common good to despair of “civilized” behavior that benefits all.

Read of listen to Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Watch Lord of the Flies on DVD

Charlotte Gray (2001, rated PG-13, 121 minutes) is a pedestrian World War II tale based on Sabastian Faulks’ eponymous novel that completes his war trilogy (see The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Birdsong).

Yet, the movie builds to a potently emotional climax and a testament to love in all its forms. Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchett) falls in love with a British pilot whose plane goes down in France, and she volunteers to work with the French Resistance in an ill-conceived plan to find him. As it turns out, she gets personally involved with one of the Communist maquis, Julien (Billy Crudup), and endures the full range of civilian suffering in the war.

There are no soldiers in bloody uniforms or bombers over Germany or V2 strikes in London or Normandy landings.

You see war as Charlotte Gray saw it, and you feel her pain.

Watch Charlotte Gray on DVD

Read or listen to Charlotte Gray: a Novel by Sebastian Faulks

Read The Girl at the Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks

Listen to the audio book or read the book or ebook of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

There is an utterly familiar plot line in To Serve Them All My Days (TV mini series, 1980-1981, 11 hours, 13 minutes): a Welsh coal miner’s son survives World War I, and becomes a teacher at a boys’ school in England south of Wales, and grows in his role to become the beloved avuncular headmaster.

John Duttine energetically plays the protagonist, David Powlett-Jones. Everyone calls him “P.J.” or “Pow-Wow,” with love and respect.

P.J. quite remarkably discovers that his calling, his life’s work, is with the faculty and boys at Bamfylde School. He judges everything from this perspective.

Much of the tale is an unfamiliarly rich creation of manifestly human characters who deal with the slings and arrows of life, and make the best of their worlds to give willing, deserving boys a good education and a glimpse of how to live a decent life.

The dialogue is above average in many scenes, and you will get inside the minds of the key players. There is enough reflection and imagination and longing and joy/despair for any discerning viewer.

No spoiler alert needed here. You can’t possibly be in doubt about how the story ends. In this story, getting there is the point of the journey.

Based on the 1973 novel To Serve Them All My Days by R. F. Delderfield.

Watch To Serve Them All My Days on DVD

Read the novel To Serve Them All My Days

Download the ebook To Serve Them All My Days through Hoopla

Listen to the original television soundtrack recordings of To Serve Them All My Days on CD

The Words (2012, rated PG, 102 minutes) is vigorous drama (but no guns, no car chase!) with some heart throbs and some lachrymose moments. There are two morals of this story, if you’re a would-be writer: don’t lose your earthshakingly good first novel in an old leather briefcase on a train, and don’t find an earthshakingly good novel on very old, smudged typewritten pages (written by an unknown someone else) in an old leather briefcase that your wife gave you. Either way, there’s a bad ending…

Imagine being tempted to pass off some other writer’s novel as your own.

There’s little reason, for most of the film, to imagine that the plot is the old play-within-a-play kind of thing. Near the end of the movie, Clay (Dennis Quaid) says to Daniella (Olivia Wilde): “You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but they never actually touch. They’re two very, very different things.”

Along with Daniella, the viewer is permitted to suspect that Clay’s book is secretly autobiographical.

Clay contradicts himself: he has made his life into a fiction, and they touch in grinding, heart- sore, never-ending ways.

Watch The Words now, by streaming through Kanopy

Watch The Words now, by streaming through Hoopla

Maybe you haven’t watched The Wizard of Oz in a while. It’s not just for kids. There are grown-up songs, introduced by Over the Rainbow, and probably you know most of the words to that song. Plus, you know what “follow the yellow brick road” means.

The Wizard of Oz (1939 version, rated G, 102 minutes) is basically a feel good film, with a great big dose of technical wizardry and a widescreen feel that was created before anyone even dreamed about widescreen.

Judy Garland was 16 years old when she starred as Dorothy trying to get back to Kansas with her adored Toto. She teams up with the iconic characters that you can name: Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the cowardly Lion. There’s a lot of prancing down the road.

Try watching Wizard one more time, with kids if they’re available. You won’t be surprised when you realize that a movie doesn’t need guns, high speed car chases, or full-frontal nudity to be more or less completely entertaining.

Maybe, like me, you can remember that The Wizard of Oz was the first movie you watched the first time you had access to a color television set.

Request The Wizard of Oz on DVD or Blu-ray

Read The Wizard of Oz, in hard cover, ebook, or audio form

This justly famous short story by Paul Gallico is surprisingly simple in its construction and densely emotional in its impact. There are familiar plot elements: ugly old man meets beautiful young girl, and they develop a close relationship. In some ways one is moved to think of Silas Marner–there are both rich and rigid qualities in their love, never consummated, sharply constrained.

The Snow Goose (1971, TV movie, 60 minutes) is a fascinating and authentic vision of Gallico’s story. Richard Harris earnestly portrays the artist, Philip Rhayader, who has life experience to share with the girl, Fritha (Jenny Agutter).

The eroticism of Rhayader’s relationship with Fritha is encompassing, reinforced repeatedly before the final scenes. It’s like the sensual heat of Girl With A Pearl Earring, deeply heartfelt and almost completely unexpressed. Vermeer painted his girl from life; Rhayader painted his girl from memory, a symbolic reflection of his restrained character and the repressed relationship.

The story line of Snow Goose is mostly mundane. It easily sustains a dramatic tension, although the Dunkirk evacuation scenes are almost disembodied, almost a charade.

Snow Goose is eminently poetic—the ending that every viewer can anticipate occurs with realistic sadness and realistic revelation. Fritha feels the words in her heart: “Philip, I love ‘ee” 

The long-patient viewer is finally released to wordless exultation.

Request The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

The plot isn’t complicated. It’s World War II, the American brass want to wipe out a French chateau filled with high-ranking German officers, and Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) is ordered to train 12 soldier convicts on death row, and parachute into France with “the dirty dozen” to do the job.

The Dirty Dozen (1967, rated “approved,” 150 minutes) was made nearly 60 years ago, and it offers literally a nearly 60-year-old all-star cast including big names like Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, and Donald Sutherland.

This is a good war movie for the younger set: nearly 60 years ago the scriptwriters didn’t fill war movie dialog with unmentionable words, and the shooting at the end is cosmetically done without much obvious gore.

This is a good war movie for the older set: it has lots of personal valor, lots of he-man scenes, lots of devotion to duty, lots of clever tricks during the knock down-drag out training scenes, some credible suspense in the action at the chateau, and, in the end, the good guys win.

Request the DVD of The Dirty Dozen

Request the Dirty Dozen on Blu-ray

Request the book The Dirty Dozen by E.M. Nathanson, on which the movie was based

Download the audio book Killin’ Generals: The Making of the Dirty Dozen by Dwayne Epstein through Hoopla

The Best Offer (2013, rated R, 131 minutes) knocks you down with a surprise ending worthy of the name. I don’t indulge in spoiler alerts. Watch the movie and be entertained.

Virgil Oldman (played intensively by Geoffrey Rush) is an acclaimed and deceitful auctioneer who is drawn into a complicated sale by the reclusive Claire (played  intensively by Sylvia Hoeks). They fall in love. Then stuff happens. There are a couple semi-distracting subplots. Donald Sutherland as Billy offers a casually funny supporting role.

A bleak heartbreaker creeps up on you in the last few minutes of the film.

In almost every way, The Best Offer is not your typical movie.

Stream The Best Offer through Kanopy

Request the DVD version of The Best Offer 

If you think you know what “hillbilly” means, watch Songcatcher and then think again. Songcatcher (2000, rated PG-13, 109 minutes) is, nominally, a story about illiterate hillbillies and the songs they sing and the naïve college professor who decides to “scientifically collect” their songs and their musical heritage.

Put on your drama hat and then watch and listen and enjoy this romp through a brief history of Appalachian/English/Celtic folk songs, and twang you have to believe in, and simply affectionate love that you want to believe in.

Janet McTeer is credible as Dr. Lily Penleric, the musicologist who “discovers” the authentic hillbilly versions of so many old English folk songs that she cherishes. Emmy Rossum as Deladis Slocumb is a real treat as she “sangs” so many of the lilting verses with raw lyrics and so much human truth.

Aidan Quinn as Tom Bledsoe is Lily’s connection to the mountain life after she falls in love with him, and before she lures him away to give the music to the down-mountain world.

If you’re looking for a feel-good movie, try this one.

Request the DVD version of Songcatcher