These long, dark nights of winter are a wonderful time to catch up on movies. Maybe you have spent some of these dark hours on Netflix catching an old movie you had never seen, or sitting through a movie on AMC you’ve seen many times before but love to watch whenever it’s on.

            Some movies are a great escape from our everyday world. They entertain us with fantasy worlds, dystopian heroes or absurdist comedy.

            Others capture the imagination because in the telling of their story, we learn something about ourselves. A theme many of these movies explore is strained relationships between children and their parents, especially fathers.

            A couple of years ago, Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. played a father and son in a film called The Judge. Downey’s character, Hank, returns home for his mother’s funeral, where he is forced to confront his strained relationship with his father, Joseph. The emotionally distant judge and his son have been estranged for years.

            Children’s movies also sometimes explore this theme. For example, Finding Nemo is about a father-son relationship of a different sort. Nemo’s dad, Marlin, is overprotective and passes his anxiety onto his son. Nemo, longing for his own identity, gets lost in the process and needs to be found.

            While such storylines seem often to be about dads, sometimes they’re about moms. This Is Where I Leave You is the story of sons and daughters trying to reconcile with their off-the-wall mother following their father’s funeral.

            The quintessential father-child reconciliation movie for many, though, is the 1989 flick, Field of Dreams. If you are

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