Movies to Watch With Your Grandparents: Six Films for a Sunday When Three Generations Share One Couch

Grandpa has the remote, which means the TV is parked on a channel nobody under sixty has heard of. Your nine-year-old is half watching, half scrolling. Grandma wants to know why there are four apps for movies now. The pot roast is gone, and three generations are sharing one couch without agreeing on a single thing to watch.

You don't need a "kids' movie" or an "old movie." You need a story that gets handed down. This Sunday is November 1, the start of Día de Muertos, a holiday built around remembering the people who came before you, and Thanksgiving is four weeks out. Many of us are about to spend more afternoons with our oldest relatives than we have all year, and starting to notice those afternoons are not unlimited.

Here are six films that work on every cushion, ordered like a long Sunday: an easy start, a gentle middle, two that will have everyone passing the tissues, and a slow ride home.

1. The Princess Bride (1987)

What it is: Rob Reiner's fairy-tale adventure, wrapped inside a visit. A grandfather (Peter Falk) shows up with a book for his sick grandson (Fred Savage), a kid who would much rather be playing video games. Inside the book: Buttercup (Robin Wright), a farmhand turned masked pirate (Cary Elwes), a swordsman hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father (Mandy Patinkin), a gentle giant (André the Giant), and more sword fights and true love than 94 minutes should hold.

Why it fits right now: It's the only movie here that is literally about this afternoon. William Goldman wrote the original novel after his two daughters kept asking him for stories, and in the book it's a father doing the reading. The film hands the job to a grandpa. In 2012, Savage told Yahoo that he loves seeing how "grandparents watch it with their grand kids," and that what stayed with him most was Falk, who made a kid on his first trip abroad feel at home. Savage shot his bedroom scenes in London after the fairy tale was finished, and as of that interview he had never met Robin Wright. The boy and the princess never shared a set. Just like a reader and a book.

One scene to look for: The interruptions. Every time the story gets mushy, the boy protests and Falk bargains. Then stay for the last bedroom scene, when the grandson asks for something he would have refused an hour and a half earlier, and Falk answers with the three words the whole movie has taught you to hear as "I love you."

2. Singin' in the Rain (1952)

What it is: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's musical comedy about Hollywood's clumsy switch from silent pictures to talkies. Kelly is a silent-screen idol, Donald O'Connor his wisecracking pal, Debbie Reynolds the chorus girl the studio suddenly needs, and Jean Hagen a star whose voice could curdle milk.

Why it fits right now: It's about new technology arriving faster than anyone can figure it out, which is the conversation on your couch every time someone explains the remote to Grandpa. The older crowd gets the songs; the kids get the slapstick. Reynolds was 19 and had no dance training when she was cast opposite two of Hollywood's best dancers. In her memoir she put it plainly: making the film and childbirth were "the two hardest things I've ever done." As for the famous legend that O'Connor ended up in the hospital after "Make 'Em Laugh" and then had to shoot it all again, Roger Ebert asked him about it onstage in 2003. O'Connor's answer: "Yeah, they made that up."

One scene to look for: "Good Morning." The number took a 15-hour day to shoot, and by the end Reynolds' feet were bleeding and she had to be carried to her dressing room. Watch her keep pace with Kelly and O'Connor, then watch the kids' faces when all three go tumbling backward over the sofa.

3. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

What it is: Hayao Miyazaki's animated story about two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, who move with their father to an old house at the edge of a forest so they can be near the hospital where their mother is recovering. An elderly neighbor the girls call Granny helps look after them, and when black fuzz scurries out of the dark corners, she calmly explains that these are soot sprites. Out in the trees lives something bigger, furrier and sleepier.

Why it fits right now: This is the one for the youngest and the oldest at the same time. It runs a tidy 86 minutes, and Roger Ebert praised what it leaves out: "A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults." If someone dozes off, the film will forgive them; one of its best scenes is a little girl napping on a giant's belly. And keep an eye on Granny: she is the adult who treats the girls' strange sightings as completely normal, the kind of grown-up kids never forget.

One scene to look for: The bus stop in the rain. The girls are waiting for their father in the dark, and the huge creature simply steps up beside them like a neighbor. Satsuki offers him an umbrella. What he does with the first raindrops that hit it is a moment of pure joy, and you will hear the whole couch laugh at once.

4. Minari (2020)

What it is: Lee Isaac Chung's semi-autobiographical drama about a Korean American family that moves to a farm in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. Jacob (Steven Yeun) wants to farm Korean vegetables; Monica (Han Ye-ri) wants less risk. Her mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), flies in from Korea to watch the kids, and young David (Alan Kim) is not impressed with the woman now sharing his room.

Why it fits right now: Because it's the most honest film we know about a grandmother who doesn't match the picture on the greeting card. David informs Soonja that she isn't a real grandma: real grandmas bake cookies, don't swear and don't wear men's underwear. Chung told NPR that his own grandmother came from Korea to mind the kids while his parents worked at a chicken factory. She was crass and eager to teach them to gamble, and yet, looking back, she was "just what I needed to survive." He kept the script secret from his family until Thanksgiving 2019, when he showed them the cut. His mother wept, and later told him that she had never been able to see her mother in her dreams. After the film, she could. Youn told PBS she built Soonja partly from her own great-grandmother, who skipped meals during wartime shortages so the family would have more. Telling that story, Youn teared up: "every time, it's not acting."

One scene to look for: The creek. Soonja walks David down to a shady patch of water and plants the seeds she carried from Korea, minari, a plant Chung described as one that takes root where nothing else will. In real life, that was the patch where Chung's grandmother tended her plants while he threw rocks at snakes. The last act takes a hard turn, so this one suits grandkids old enough to sit with something sad.

5. Coco (2017)

What it is: Pixar's Día de Muertos musical, directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. Miguel wants to play guitar, but music is banned in his shoemaking family. On the Day of the Dead he stumbles into the Land of the Dead and meets the ancestors from his family's altar. Back home, his great-grandmother Mama Coco, voiced by the Mexican actress Ana Ofelia Murguía, is losing her memory and holding on to the little she still remembers of her father.

Why it fits right now: The holiday it celebrates starts this Sunday, and the film is about what families owe their oldest members: to remember them. Unkrich told Deadline that the most valuable part of the research was living alongside families, many with "three or four generations living together under one roof." The film's marigold bridge grew out of a real tradition: petal paths from the cemetery to the family's door, so the ancestors can find their way home. Murguía died in 2024 at 90, which gives her quiet scenes extra weight now.

One scene to look for: Wait for the moment, near the end, when Miguel picks up a guitar in Mama Coco's room. You'll be glancing sideways down the couch.

6. The Straight Story (1999)

What it is: A true story, directed, improbably, by David Lynch. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is 73, walks with two canes and doesn't see well, and when he hears that his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has had a stroke, he sets out to see him the only way he can: on a John Deere riding mower. The real trip happened in 1994, roughly 260 miles from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin.

Why it fits right now: End the day at the speed of a lawn mower. It's rated G and was released by Disney, which is why, according to co-writer John Roach, the Cannes audience burst out laughing when the opening card read "Walt Disney Pictures Presents A Film By David Lynch." Farnsworth earned an Oscar nomination for a performance built mostly out of listening, and Roach's description of the real man, a "tough old cob" with a smile in his voice, could describe half the grandfathers in the Midwest.

One scene to look for: Watch who Alvin meets, in order. Early on it's a pregnant teenage runaway; much later it's a fellow World War II veteran, two old men trading war memories in a quiet bar. As Alvin gets closer to his brother, the strangers keep getting older, like mile markers counting down a life. Roach told Texas Public Radio that nobody planned that pattern. It's there anyway.

Before Everyone Heads Home

Here's what all six films understand: grandparents are where the stories are kept. The book Falk brings to the bedroom. The seeds in Soonja's suitcase. The brother at the end of Alvin's road. Each film is about someone old handing something to someone young, and about the young one realizing, a beat later than they should, what they were given. That's why they reach grandparents and grandkids at the same moment, from opposite ends of the couch.

Somewhere around the last film, the nine-year-old will have put the phone down, and Grandma will have stopped asking about the apps. Nobody needed the perfect movie, just a reason to stay on the same couch a little longer.

For the other side of the story, grown children too busy for their visiting parents, our review of Tokyo Story is the next film to watch. And on your next rewatch of The Straight Story, count the ages of the strangers Alvin meets; once you see the pattern, the last scene lands even harder. More moods are coming. Until then, hand Grandpa the remote. Or better yet, a book.