10 Great Family Movies

The list of 10 great family movies include some of the most cherished movies of all time. Family movies are generally geared toward kids, but have enough “grown up” stuff in them that parents and adults get a kick out of these movies as well (like the double entendres in "Shrek"). Family movies are a great way to experience cinema with your children—good, clean entertainment that you can talk about later.

1. “Mary Poppins” One of the great family movies of all time, this movie stars Julie Andrews as the bizarre nanny and the highly entertaining Dick Van Dyke as the humorous chimney sweep. The children Mary Poppins watches are finally given some love and attention and learn a lot about life.
2. “Shrek” Shrek is the anti-Disney hero, starring in the anti-fairy tale. Kids and adults will highly enjoy this irreverent movie with the swamp ogre who gets unwillingly thrust into the middle of an adventure tale. He even has to rescue a princes … of sorts.
3. “Finding Nemo” This Pixar/Disney movie became an instant classic and is one of the greatest family movies ever made. It stars Albert Brooks doing the voice for an overprotective clown fish dad who sets out to find his abducted son. On the way he meets the hysterical Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, cursed with short-term memory loss.
4. “Elf” Elf is a delightful Christmas film and one of the great family movies ever. Will Ferrell plays an elf who finds out he’s actually an adopted human. He leaves the North Pole to visit New York and find his real dad. Typical fish-out-of-water hilarity ensues.  
5. “Toy Story” movie This is a three-fer! The original "TS" movie was groundbreaking in its use of computer animation. Over the course of the three movies, the characters in this film—Buzz, Woody and the rest—have become family favorites in every household. The movies are charming, funny and warmhearted.
6. “The Princess Diaries” The adorable Anne Hathaway—when she was still adorable and not quite sexy—stars in this cute story about a young woman who discovers she’s actually the heir to a throne in Europe. She must undergo a royal makeover to please her grandmother queen.
7. “Swiss Family Robinson” This adaptation of a book is one of the greatest family movies. A Disney film from 1960 follows a family that has been shipwrecked and makes the best of it by building an enormous treehouse out of leftovers from their boat. In the end, the family fights of pirates and gets rescued.
8. “Disney’s The Kid” This movies stars Bruce Willis as a grumpy adult who inexplicably finds a runaway kid hanging around his house. The more Willis gets to know the child, the more he realizes that the kid is himself as a young boy. A breakthrough occurs, making Willis’s character appreciate life and become a good man.
9. “The Princess Bride” This is a great family movie and a classic from the 1980s. It follows the story of a young girl and her Wesley, who she thought she had lost forever but returned to her as a pirate of sorts. He must fight off Prince Humperdinck and his men in order to reclaim her as his love.
10. “It’s a Wonderful Life” This Christmas classic is one of the greatest family movies ever made. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, a man who can’t escape his hometown. After a bad turn of events has him considering suicide, an angel appears and shows him how bad off so many people in his life would be if he’d never been born. The movie has a heartwarming ending.