‘Sobbing in the aisles’: writers on their most memorable parent-kid film experiences

This summer, a new book of movie recommendations for children called Hey Kids, Watch This! will be published. It’s been produced by distributor A24, an outfit whose own titles – Uncut Gems, Midsommar, The Zone of Interest – are not immediately family friendly.
The book is correspondingly chewier than most. Yes, Free Willy features, but so does Hedgehog in the Fog, Yuri Norstein’s 10-minute short from 1975. It sings the praises of modern mainstream blockbusters such as Chicken Run, along with older, more niche titles such as as are Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
Hey Kids, Watch This! is most of all designed to prompt discussion, even bonding, between parents and their children. It acts as a vehicle for families to For them touse filmuse cinema, big or small screen, as a tool to understand the world around them – and each other.
So we asked our writers to tell us about their most memorable movie-watching experience, either with their own children or with their parents when they were young. Dim the lights, switch off your phone, and let the show begin. Catherine Shoard
Xan Brooks
“Show me a classic,” my teenage stepson demanded, although what’s classic to me doesn’t always translate. When the kid was 11, we watched Airplane! together and it went down in flames. I saw it as a knockabout spoof of 70s disaster movies. He saw it as a nightmarish drama about a stricken plane in which all the passengers have been driven mad from terror. He said: “Why are they joking? They’re all going to die.”
This time I sat him in front of Withnail and I, which I hadn’t revisited for many years. Bruce Robinson’s comedy turns out to be as much about the fear of homosexuality as it is about the fear of failure, obscurity and of never playing the Dane. The kid was perplexed. “I don’t get why they’re so freaked out by Uncle Monty,” he said. “I mean, Withnail and I – they’re a gay couple, aren’t they?” Next week, I’ve decided, we’re watching Todd Solondz’s Happiness.
Libby Brooks
It would, I was certain, be the ideal corrective to the diet of Star Wars my son had been greedily ingesting thanks to his Lucas-fan father. He’s only five – all that violence isn’t age appropriate. Instead of melting limbs, decapitated droids and explosives we would watch a cartoon with some lovely songs.
To this day, I don’t know precisely what it was about Disney’s musical fantasy Encanto that terrified my boy into sleeplessness for months afterwards. He said he was too scared even to describe it. I sat at his bedside night after night, soothing him back to sleep, while my husband said smugly: “He was never like this with Yoda.”
I asked him about Encanto again yesterday, before writing this up. “I never want to talk about it,” he replied through gritted teeth. He was rewatching The Clone Wars.
Dylan B Jones
My dad’s Ford Mondeo wended home through country lanes from the threadbare seaside town of Paignton in Devon – the closest place that had a cinema. We’d just seen Die Another Day, the 2002 Bond film starring camp icons Rosamund Pike, Madonna, Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry.
I mentioned one of the final shots, Berry and Brosnan lying in a bed of diamonds, obviously having just had sex. Glancing in the rear-view, my dad decided it was time to have The Talk. He said to me: “Now, you know what they should’ve done there?” I shook my head. “Shown a condom,” he continued, lightly. “There’s nothing wrong with showing sex scenes, but they should’ve shown a condom as well – or at least a condom wrapper.” I nodded politely and looked out at the sea.
Stuart Heritage
I’ll sometimes yank my kids out of the cinema before a film ends, either because the film is too scary (most MCU films) or too dull (If). So when I took my eight-year-old to see Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume last year, I was convinced we’d make an early exit. This was my fault. I meant to book the dubbed version, but then we turned up to a subtitled screening. The poor kid was unexpectedly watching the film on the highest difficulty setting.
I wanted to abandon ship, but then something weird happened. My son didn’t seem to notice the subtitles. He didn’t say anything, in fact. He sat there engrossed until the final scene, when he leaned over and whispered: “My heart is beating so fast.” I couldn’t have been prouder. But then he made me take him to see Trolls Band Together, so I’ve written him out of my will.
Rachel Aroesti
An enormous chocolate cake steeped in blood and sweat! Telekinesis soundtracked by doo-wop! Signing adoption papers on the bonnet of a car! Like any 90s child with an extremely limited VHS collection, I have approximately seven films seared indelibly on my brain, and Danny DeVito’s 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda is one of them. So, after we read the book, I wasted no time in sharing this formative cultural experience with my five-year-old – aware it wasn’t anodyne fluff, but also convinced that “mildly disturbing” was the defining quality of any great children’s film.
At first, I was delighted to note how sourly hilarious it had remained. In fact, it took me a while to fully accept that this was a comedy about child abuse. I turned it off once my son began to whimper at the sight of Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris, impressively nauseating), then began to question why I was so determined to pass down this wacky tale of criminal childcare. I desperately tried to square the circle – the soundtrack, those performances – before admitting defeat.
On the plus side, I didn’t end up scarring a new generation – or exerting any influence at all: when I mentioned the film to my son recently, he said he had no idea what I was talking about.
Jonathan Freedland
When our children were nine and six, we took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to New Zealand, travelling around in a camper van for the best part of a month. I would drive, the kids in the cabin behind me and my wife, and occasionally we would point out the extraordinary landscape outside the window. “Have a look at that lake, boys,” we would say, over our shoulders. “Have you ever seen water so blue?” Or: “That’s not even a mountain. That’s a volcano.” We would wait till we heard an “Ooh” or an “Ahh” in reply, and then drive on happily, smugly confident that we were teaching our sons to know the true wonder and awe of nature.
But one day, as we ventured deeper into the South Island, I made the mistake of looking back properly. I saw the pair of them strapped in, staring not at the magnificence of the Fox glacier, but at a portable DVD player showing – yet again – Toy Story 3. It turned out that each time we had announced a new stunning sight outside their window, they would offer up the requisite “Wow” – while never taking their eyes off the screen. They had the whole routine down.
As it happens, Toy Story 3 is a good film, about the pain a parent feels when a child leaves home for college. We’re well into that stage of life now. I know that when I next see that movie, what I’ll hear will be the feigned reactions of my two young sons – ooh and ahh and wow – when they were so entranced by Woody, Buzz and the gang that they couldn’t look away. And I will be glad of the reminder.
Sirin Kale
I had just turned 12 and was determined to use this privilege to watch a 12-rated movie, an experience hitherto denied to me by my unreasonably controlling parents. A family outing to our local Cineworld: my sisters wanted to watch another film so my mother took them, and my father took me to my first choice, Coyote Ugly.
When the women started stripping to skimpy tank tops and climbing on the bar I felt him tense. When they poured water over each other in a slow-motion montage he checked his watch. When Piper Perabo performed an extended striptease before an excruciating sex scene with Adam Garcia, I felt a full-body horror descend upon us both, like how the inhabitants of a deserted farmhouse must feel when they see a zombie army cresting over the hill.
He wanted to leave, I wanted to stay. I triumphed. To this day, I can’t hear the opening bars of LeAnn Rimes’s Can’t Fight the Moonlight without flashing back to my 12-year-old self in a cinema seat, rigid with embarrassment. “How was the film?” my mother asked as we rejoined them in the foyer. “Awful,” my father and I responded in unison. Coyote Ugly – an excellent film, but best watched at sleepovers with other little girls.
Tim Jonze
An army of mini Elsas had descended upon Catford Mews cinema in south-east London. This was the frenzied opening week of Frozen II and our three-year-old daughter was here to see it with two friends. As with the original, the film worked its magic, lulling the noisy little people in blue princess dresses into a trance. Then the credits rolled and Romy and her mates raced down to the front to dance to the outro music – Panic At the Disco’s rock-opera version of the film’s theme tune, Into the Unknown. They gasped as the projector transformed their little bodies into giant silhouettes.
That’s when the lyrics hit me. In the film they’re self-explanatory enough – Elsa is answering a call to uncover a truth about her past (“Don’t you know there’s part of me that longs to go / Into the unknown”). But here it became a song about young lives themselves. Every single day these three girls were indeed venturing into the unknown – the thrill and the fear of life itself. The same was true of being a parent. I left the cinema in a wobbly emotional state.
Despite being a hit on the day, Frozen II couldn’t compete with the original. In fact, Romy has never once asked to see it again. Probably for the best – I’m not sure I could handle it.
Bibi van der Zee
The lowest point of all the many films I watched with my children at the cinema over the course of their childhoods was the coincidence of the arrival of 3D with one of the worst hangovers I’ve ever had. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was no masterpiece anyway, but the combination of a hot, wriggly toddler on my lap (Joe was incapable of sitting still for more than three minutes), a thumping headache made worse by having to wear those stupid glasses, and violently coloured meatballs being spewed at me out of the screen still haunts me to this day.
The best, or one of them, was going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens with the same Joe a decade or so later. By this point he could not only sit still but could buy me snacks at critical moments. I was incredibly emotional about the new film, and it was as wonderful as I’d hoped. At the moment when Rey and Finn are running through the junkyard and the camera swings, abruptly, to reveal the Millennium Falcon, the entire cinema erupted in cheers and I mistily hugged Joe. It was glorious.
Amy Hawkins
One of the few things that united my divorced parents was a total disregard for the idea of “age appropriate”. Friends invited to my 11th birthday sleepover were traumatised by an overnight viewing of The Shining.
I wasn’t much older when my mum snuck me into the cinema to watch Ang Lee’s sumptuous, 18-rated historical drama Lust, Caution. The 2000s were a golden era for spellbinding Asian blockbusters; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a family favourite. A Chinese immigrant raising a child in the UK today would have less choice of Asian films than my mum did back then.
But the thrill of seeing such a gorgeous Chinese film in the local Odeon was somewhat outweighed by the fact that my mum suddenly discovered a sense of decorum, and insisted on physically covering my eyes in any sex scene, which fans of the film will know makes up at least half of the running time. Cue much squirming, complaining and a happy – and eye-opening – memory.
Peter Bradshaw
When my son was about 13, we found ourselves at a loose end one Sunday; I suggested we go to the cinema and the only thing remotely attractive at the nearby Cineworld in Wood Green, north London, was a documentary called Mountain – a rapturous collection of spectacular images, poetically and resonantly narrated by Willem Dafoe. I’d seen it the week before and loved it.
We were the only people there. Yet the moment the film started, Dominic started giggling at the sonorous voiceover, which did indeed sound sillier than I remembered. And I couldn’t help myself chortling too. Dominic was soon whispering his own version of the basso profundo narration into my ear: “A MOUNTAIN isn’t just STONE and ROCK it is DREAMS and IDEAS,but mainly let’s face it STONE and ROCK. It is HIGH, it is totally HIGH in the SKY.”
I couldn’t help joining in: “It is CERTAINLY not LOW it is HIGH. The first syllable rhymes with ROUND because it is ROUND.” Dominic boomed: “ROCK and STONE with a POINTY BIT AT THE TOP.” How very deplorable of us.
Andrew Pulver
By the summer of 2014, heading into the West End with my four-year-old for a Sunday afternoon screening of kiddie cartoons had become bit of a habit, especially with her cousins (aged four and six) in tow. They all liked Postman Pat, so a long-form movie version would be childcare manna, right? Er, not quite. Possibly in an attempt to move on from the source show’s inoffensive trivialities, the film’s makers decided to stretch their legs creatively and juice up the storyline for the new generation of hipster kids brought up on Pixar and Pokémon.
Casting Stephen (“Lynn, these are sex people!”) Mangan as Pat was the first wink to the grownups that this was going to a bit different. Introducing a then relatively novel X Factor element to the storyline was perhaps more understandable, but I don’t think the animators quite anticipated how a singing competition might stoke preschoolers’ tension.
It was the arrival of an army of killer robots, shooting lasers out of their eyes, that really sent the audience nuts; terror-struck tots going down like ninepins, sobbing in the aisles, hiding under the seats, a mass stampede for the exits. In the end, it wasn’t so bad that a few ice-creams couldn’t calm them down, but the roiling mass of traumatised little ’uns is still etched in my brain.
Alan Evans
At the age of 14, in a classic teenage search for my own identity, I was trying out being a film guy. Living 15 miles from a cinema, this mostly meant taping late-night arthouse films on Channel 4. I was also, in case that didn’t make it explicit enough, very much a virgin.
In late 1999, American Pie was released a few months after it had been a big hit in the US. I knew enough to know there had been buzz around it, that it was a comedy, and that had substantially outperformed its budget. I asked my father if he’d drive me the 30-mile round trip to see it and he kindly agreed.
I did not realise he would also be keen to see this hyped new film his son had shown an interest in. I did not know it was a sex comedy featuring a man fucking a pie. And I will never forget the silent drive home with neither of us willing or able to acknowledge the excruciating experience we’d just shared.
Sammy Gecsoyler
Most Disney references go over my head and for that I have my mum to thank. When I was very young, she would buy me and my sister a Disney DVD from Woolworths every few months. The movies were magically delivered by a “movie fairy” to the front door after she put a £10 note outside.
However, instead of the classics many of you know and love, the films were usually sequels to the classics. Aladdin 3, The Lion King 2 and Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. That was the worst of the lot, but kicked off the tradition.
As a result, the bulk of my Disney knowledge is made up more of deep cuts rather than the obvious stuff. If you were to ask me about Prince Charming’s courtship of Cinderella circa 1940, I would not have a clue, but if you were after details of their direct-to-DVD honeymoon, then I am your man.
Ryan Gilbey
The Artist – that Oscar-winning, black-and-white, near-wordless French tribute to the silent era – would always have been a wonderful film, but it holds a place in my heart because it tempted my youngest child back to the cinema after a period of fearful and near-total abstinence.
Three years earlier, when she was eight, I foolishly took her to see Coraline. It would likely have been a terrifying experience even if she didn’t suffer at the time from koumpounophobia, a fear of buttons. (They form a central part of the horror in Coraline.) I don’t remember how I persuaded her that The Artist would be a safe bet, but I do recall the effervescence it inspired in us.
A week later, we returned to watch it again. Sure, the hero is melancholy and even briefly suicidal. On the other hand, the film has an impishly cute dog, lashings of old-school charm and pizzazz – and, crucially, no giant buttons.
Cath Clarke
Before When Marnie Was There, I used to say that lockdown had ruined my daughter’s viewing habits. Pre-Covid, she was on 20 minutes a day of carefully curated, gentle kids TV.
After two weeks of lockdown, aged three, she’d learned how to use the remote control and discovered Netflix. I thought we’d lost her.
Then, one wet Sunday a couple of years ago, we put on When Marnie Was There. As a family, we’d watched other Studio Ghibli films together, but something about this slow, gorgeous animation (a world away from the loud, obnoxious telly shows she usually favoured) got her; the connection was instant and intense.
Now aged seven, she still gets the same dreamy look whenever we put on Marnie.
Rhik Samadder
I can’t remember the turn of events that led to 15-year-old me watching Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 film Jude, starring Christopher Eccleston, with my mum in a cinema. Based on the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure, I remember the sex being anything but obscured. It was so graphic I had to keep shuffling seats away from my unruffled mum. By the time the credits rolled, I was almost in a different room.
Looking back, I think it was the film’s bleakness that repulsed me: its insistence that life was a relentless horror as unspeakable as it was unavoidable. Perhaps she trusted I was mature enough to handle themes such as social injustice, child murder, tragic love, and a godless, cruel universe. I was not. Scarring.
Kate Abbott
“Mummy, what’s anxiety?” asked my daughter, as Anxiety, the orange character with the huge awkward grin and frazzled pineapple hair pops up beside Joy and the rest of the Inside Out gang. A dull ache pulses through me. She’s only six. How can I spare my daughter this lifelong hell?
We were meant to be having a fun Monday afternoon – sneaking takeaway pizzas into the cinema after school, the dream – only for her to end up asking a question that I cannot face answering.
I don’t want her to know it exists, let alone feel it as keenly or frequently as me. I decide to squeeze her hand and encourage her to just keep watching.
Soon enough, I find solace on screen: Nostalgia, an old woman in rose-tinted specs, emerges from a cupboard and my daughter finds her hilarious. Sure, she’ll have to fend off the fear and angst and ennui, but she’ll discover the beauty of that in time too. Perhaps even our pizza party will feature. “Those were the days.”
Keza Macdonald
In the late 90s/early 00s, at the height of Pokémania, I was one of the children queueing excitedly for the first animated Pokémon movie. Pity the poor adult I dragged along to chaperone me, for it was insufferably turgid, and marked the start of a lifetime of being crushingly disappointed by abominable video game movies.
But miraculously, by the time my own kids were old enough to watch films, we had a decent one: Detective Pikachu, which came on TV at exactly the right time one Christmas afternoon. The second I heard Ryan Reynolds’ voice coming out of Pikachu’s adorable mouth, I was sold – and remarkably, so were my children.
I liked the film slightly less by the time I had explained the convoluted plot to a seven-year-old for the 12th time, but it still marked two important milestones: the first time my kids watched a film with me all the way through, and the first time I saw a video game movie that wasn’t complete rubbish.
Charlotte O’Sullivan
Watching Rosemary’s Baby with Ada was blissful, because she reacted in exactly the way I’d hoped. Her eight-year-old self loved spooky movies, beautiful women from New York (her dad was born there) who looked a bit like dolls, and soundtracks with a the feel of a wonky lullaby.
Ada gasped the second she saw Mia Farrow as a wide-eyed newly wed and squirmed as Rosemary met her new neighbours. (Ada said, in a thrilled whisper: “Are they nice? I hope they’re nice.”)
By the way, I knew the film off by heart, so was able to fast forward through the non-child-friendly stuff. Of course I didn’t show Ada the whole thing. What do you think I am? Evil?
Alexi Duggins
ET: adorable interstellar tyke or nightmarish space demon? As a four-year-old in a multiplex in Aberystwyth, west Wales, I was in the latter camp. From the moment he scuttled out of an eldritch mist like the Demogorgon’s weirdo little cousin, my blood curdled. There were tears, almost instantly. What was this monster? This boggle-eyed gonad? This sentient hammer wrapped in flayed human flesh? And other questions I wouldn’t have had the vocab to ask.
The final straw came when he terrified a tiny Drew Barrymore almost as much as the prospect of running a talkshow during Writers Guild strikes. I was whisked into an empty lobby, where my mum tried soothing me.
She possibly pointed out that my two-year-old sister was such a fan of ET that every off-camera moment left her yelling: “Where TV?” I forget the exact details – all I remember is the sweet relief of being nowhere near the cinema screen. We left shortly after – not quite the pleasant Welsh holiday movie jaunt my parents had hoped for.
Leslie Felperin
Like other film critics with kids, I’ve been hauling my in-house, underage focus group of two to preview screenings since they were potty-trained. But it’s best not to judge films on their reactions because until they start to develop proper critical faculties, they tend to like everything made for kids.
However, I could tell from my seven-year-old eldest kid’s reaction to the first Paddington movie that this film was definitely the shizz. He howled with giggles and delight throughout, especially at the scene where Paddington floods the bathroom. Afterwards, the PR asked if we could bring him to all the press screenings.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t show him the film again for a few years because he tried to flood the bathroom at home in an effort to imitate his hero, which just goes to show that all those fearmongers are right – films really do influence and shape behaviour.
Ann Lee
I was a teenager when I first watched Chungking Express. My Chinese immigrant parents had obtained a copy of Wong Kar-Wai’s breakthrough film on VHS. Were they fans of dreamy arthouse fare about love, alienation and connection? No, they most definitely were not. But consuming Chinese TV shows and films was the main way they stayed connected to their culture so far away from home in the UK.
I remember vividly how my mum, sitting bored on the sofa, complained several times about how nothing was happening as Faye Wong pursued Tony Leung Chiu-wai by secretly cleaning his flat. But I was enraptured. Here was the chaos of life and love expressed in the most quirky, stylish and poetic way – it stirred something inside me and still does.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve rewatched Chungking Express since then. So, thank you, mum, for introducing me to my favourite film even though you would rather have watched a gory Chow Yun-fat punch-up instead.
Dale Berning Sawa
My daughter Tsubamé and I both fell hard for Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. We still have Post Malone’s Sunflower from the soundtrack on heavy rotation. As soon as this sequel hit Hackney Picturehouse in east London in 2023, we were there. Tsu and her friend Raheemah got dressed up and we bought lots of ice-cream mochis.
The girls, then both nine, had been discussing, at length, how the big brothers they knew were now sagging their pants. So they loved Daniel Kaluuya’s Hobie Brown talking about “having a laugh at the pub with the mandem”. The film had us all aloft. Right up until that amputation of a cliffhanger, which saw the entire cinema on its feet yelling “Whatttt” at the screen. Still, we walked home texting more friends about going again. We bought it when it started streaming. It became our steadfast go-to film and Christmas Day projection.
It’s the magically shifting animation, the on-point music, the soaring through street tops, the sitting upside down in the sunset. Mostly, it’s the dreamy kid wanting to fly and their mum needing them to “promise to take care” of that little kid – that is, of themselves – in her stead. Just writing about it has me choked up. Sometimes mums can get intense. But referencing a film mum, less so. So I’ll say: “It’s just like Miles’s mom, remember, when she tells him to make sure he never doubts that he is loved and never lets anyone tell him he doesn’t belong.” And Tsu will smile and hug me so tight and then off she’ll go, ready to take on the world.
Dave Simpson
My father died when I was very young and my mother faced a lot of struggles raising me as a single parent. However, watching old horror films on ITV’s Appointment With Fear series (on Fridays at 10.30pm, way past my usual bedtime) proved to be real bonding sessions.
I don’t know if there was some deep psychological meaning behind it all – a strange way of processing death and loss, maybe – but I found that being scared, with mum there, strangely comforting.
The section of the Dr Terror’s House of Horrors anthology – where Christopher Lee plays a snooty art critic who is pursued by the severed hand of a wronged artist – terrified me most, even though it looks quite silly now.
It’s ironic that I became a (music) critic, but while I’ve been besieged by angry bands and fans, I’m yet to encounter a bloodthirsty severed hand.
Chris Broughton
I’d planned to watch Metropolis – Fritz Lang’s Weimar-period sci-fi dramatisation of class conflict – one day, but didn’t expect my daughter, then seven, to be the catalyst.
A school music lesson featuring Queen’s We Will Rock You led to us watching their Radio Ga Ga video on YouTube, and questions from Ivy about the “big clock” and robot. When she learned these were from a film nearly 100 years old, she wanted to see it immediately.
I wondered if we had the stamina for two-and-a-half hours of a subtitled, silent film, but we both sat spellbound throughout. Had the film instilled a fascination in Ivy for German expressionism? Emboldened, I suggested The Cabinet of Dr Caligari for the following night’s viewing. “No thanks,” said Ivy.
Catherine Shoard
A few weeks ago, the producer of Despicable Me 4 told me that the reason it was doing so well was that it was performing not like a family film but a regular mainstream comedy. Adults were going with friends, even on dates – no children necessary.
OK, I said, writing it down, still a bit sceptical. Then I saw The Lego Movie with my son on TV and everything I secretly knew from 18 months immersion in contemporary children’s cinema was confirmed.
These films aren’t just better than the ones three or four decades ago. Many of them are better than most grownup movies today. The wit and invention, the plotting and detail. The subtle messaging and the emotional wallop.
Need proof? Just try Leo or Shaun the Sheep Movie, Madagascar 3 or The Mitchells vs the Machines, Inside Out , Paddington or Toy Story 3: all sophisticated, subversive and genuinely funny.
My son laughed his head off at The Lego Movie and goggled happily during the less hilarious bits . So did I. Much of the pleasure of parenting is vicarious. But with movies like these, it’s both.