By Mary Shaffer
and Jerry Bunin
Telegram-Tribune

Winter and the holidays are times for families to share a film. Unfortunately, Hollywood makes too few films worth sharing.

It's a sad comment on our times that the most successful recent holiday movie was "Home Alone" (1990), John Hughes' ridiculously violent and slapstick view of childhood.

The box office battle this Christmas pits annoying MacCauley Culkin in the comic book adventure "Richie Rich" vs. Winona Ryder in "Little Women," Louisa May Alcott's classic tale of her 19th Century American family.

If artistic and family values matter, "Little Women" would triumph. Don't count on it. However, quality films about real families exist on video and are still being made.

They entertain us and introduce different cultures and new ideas, offering fresh characters in timeless tales that bring richer insights and deeper understanding with each viewing .

Some of the best focus on adults looking back on lessons learned in childhood but only fully appreciated decades later.

"Little Women" exemplifies an artist mining her past for universal truths about families and how parents shape their children's values.

In "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945-NR) and "I Remember Mama" (1948-NR), young women rise out of poverty to realize their dream of becoming writers.

They succeed with the help of self-sacrificing, hard-working immigrant mothers determined to make better lives for their children early this century.

Going without and pulling together are familiar themes to anyone who watched "The Waltons," Earl Hamner Jr.'s long-running TV series about growing up in the rural South during the Depression.

Hamner's large, loving family was the model for two films.

"Spencer's Mountain" (1963-NR) chronicles how poor, uneducated but proud parents send their oldest son to college, a family first.

"The Homecoming--A Christmas Story" (1971-NR) finds the Walton clan on Christmas Eve, anxiously awaiting the return of their father forced to leave home to find work.

An absentee father motivates "King of the Hill" (1993-PG13), A.E. Hotchner's gloomier Depression-era portrait of childhood.

With his mother hospitalized and irresponsible father on the road, a 12-year-old boy fends for himself in a St. Louis hotel brimming with colorful, sometimes dangerous characters.

Armed only with imagination, nerve and a key to the hotel storeroom, the boy not only survives but finally triumphs over circumstances ranging from amusing and poignant to scary.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962-NR), another serious Depression-era tale of the rural South, remains powerful and moving today.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel scouts a memorable year for a widowed lawyer (Gregory Peck's Oscar-winning performance), his two children and their friends and neighbors in a small Alabama town.

The kids experience first-hand the ugly consequences of racial prejudice and social injustice when their father defends a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. Life teaches them to look beyond appearances and accept others for what they are and to appreciate the values parents pass on by example.

In a key moment, they discover that their passive father is an expert marksman, but it is his quiet intensity and moral strength they carry with them as adults.

A strong father is at the heart of "A River Runs Through It" (1992), 70-year-old Norman Maclean's lyrical recollection of his Montana youth and his younger brother's untimely death.

Both boys inherit a love of language and fly-fishing from their restrained Presbyterian minister father who finds art and grace and the stuff of life in the natural rhythms of words and water.

But they apply his lessons and approach life from different angles. Like turns in a river, one is constant and steady and the other wild and unpredictable.

Hard-working, intellectual Norman exceeds expectations and successfully aspires to a life beyond his immediate horizons. Earthy, easy-going Paul lives in the moment and is willing to drown to achieve fly-fishing perfection.

Just as the frontier, immigrant and Depression experiences shaped American lives, World War II left indelible marks on a trio of European filmmakers.

In "Hope and Glory" (1987-PG13), the bombing of London becomes an adventure for a young boy who dreams of being a pilot and plays amid the wreckage and ruins of his neighbors' homes.

British director John Boorman's autobiographical tale provides a complex portrait of a family coping with the excitement, terror, sacrifice and romance of war.

A terrible moment of wartime betrayal inspired director Louis Malle to return to his native France to write and direct "Au Revoir, Les Enfants" (Goodbye, Children) (1987).

The melancholy saga centers on his Catholic boarding school friendship with one of a handful of Jewish boys hidden from the Nazis by compassionate priests.

The French boy strikes a bond with the outcast stranger only to later betray his friend to the Gestapo with a subtle glance that still haunts the narrator more than 40 years later.

The friendship between a childless man and a fatherless boy and the magical allure of movies in post-war Italy are lovingly explored in Guiseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso" (1989).

The story begins with the boy--now a successful but spiritually tired filmmaker--drawn home after 30 years for the funeral of the projectionist who taught him about movies and life.

Through flashbacks, we trace their growing friendship and the changing role the movie theater plays in their village and the filmmaker rediscovers his passion for his art and life while watching images projected on a screen.

It is a fitting moment that conveys how great movies can be a legacy passed on from one generation to the next.

Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a Telegram-Tribune reporter.

• "All the Way Home" (1963-NR)
• "Amarcord" (1974-R)
• "A Christmas Story" (1983)
• "Desert Bloom" (1986)
• "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959-NR)
• "Empire of the Sun" (1987)
• "Fanny and Alexander" (1983-R)
• "Flirting" (1990-NR)
• "The 400 Blows" (1959-NR)
• "The Getting of Wisdom" (1977-NR)
• "The Great Santini" (1979)
• "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" (1968-G)
• "How Green Was My Valley" (1941-NR)
• "The Last Emperor" (1987-PG13)
• "The Learning Tree" (1969)
• "My Brilliant Career" (1979-G)
• "My Father's Glory" & "My Mother's Castle" (1990-G)
• "My Girl" (1991)
• "My Life as a Dog" (1985-NR)
• "Rambling Rose" (1991-R)
• "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (1993)
• "Stand By Me" (1987-R)
• "This Boy's Life" (1993-R)
• "A World Apart" (1988)