As contemporary romantic comedies go, The Broken Hearts Gallery is like something you'd create from a kit. The instructions are easy to follow, every expected piece is dutifully included, and there's no veering from the manual – what you wind up getting looks remarkably similar to what's pictured on the box. (Or, in this case, the poster.) But a pandemic-era lack of cineplex options can make you inordinately grateful for simple, much-appreciated qualities such as charm and wit and personality, all of which writer/director Natalie Krinsky's debut feature has in abundance.

Presented as part of the Quad City Engineering and Science Council's “Teacher's Night Out Series,” the first episode of Ken Burns' new documentary series The Gene: An Intimate History will be screened at the Blue Grass Drive-in on September 17 – a free event co-hosted by the Quad Cities' PBS station WQPT-TV, and the introduction to an acclaimed four-hour work that the U.K.'s The Telegraph awarded four stars and called “serious-minded, informative, and knowledgeable.”

Writer/director Josh Boone's fledgling-superhero saga The New Mutants is ironically titled considering there's nothing remotely new about it. Not the story, not the storytelling, not the overall crumminess of its execution, and certainly not the film itself, which was originally planned for release in the spring of 2018, and then was delayed and re-scheduled and delayed and re-scheduled until it was finally unleashed, like a sacrificial lamb, on August 28.

Here are five of my favorite family-themed films released between 1972 and 1997, works boasting relatives you'll love, relatives you'll loathe, and relatives you'll be both saddened and grateful to see go. Trust me: They're cinematic offers you can't refuse.