Focus Features

My father took my mother to see this film as a treat for having given birth to me, so I sort of feel I picked the movie up by association at a very impressionable age. Apart from the gender roles being a little rigid, it's actually a great advert for family life; and its musical sequences – for example, the wonderfully endless “Do-Re-Mi” bit – are some of the best in film. I love it so much I once went on the Sound of Music coach tour in Austria, and saw the actual gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” – wow!

A gripping psychological drama, in which an extended family gather to celebrate a patriarch's 60th birthday, and devastating secrets are exposed. What's great about this film is that it's not just about trauma and its aftermath, it's also about recovery. The scene in which the son makes his speech exposing his father as a child-abuser, only to be politely ignored by the disconcerted party guests, is a brilliant representation of the dynamics of shame and family denial. But the film has moments of dark farce, too, and is ultimately life-affirming – a real achievement.

Set in a dour German village on the eve of the First World War, this is another film about the traumas of family life, this time with no hint of an upbeat ending. Here the family abuses are part of a larger social system in which victimized people make victims of others, and violence is random, brutal and often baffling. At the same time, the movie is breathtakingly beautiful to watch, and it maintains throughout an intensely historical quality that is miles away from the carefully coiffed look of most mainstream period dramas.

The first Addams Family movie was released in the wake of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and provided a brilliant antidote to the so-called “family values” of repressive right-wing policy. But the film is a joy in all sorts of ways, being funny, ghoulish, and visually exciting, and featuring a pitch-perfect cast – particularly in the form of Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, and Christina Ricci as Wednesday. What I love about it is that it manages to celebrate family bonds, while still feeling kinky and alternative – “queer” in the best sense of the word.

This is one of my favorite Judy Garland movies, with a depiction of family life that's essentially sentimental, yet has areas of darkness too. The songs are correspondingly diverse, from the gloriously cheerful “Trolley Song,” to the wistful “The Boy Next Door” – surely one of Judy's best songs – and the achingly poignant “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” A movie in which family life is all the more precious for being just a little bit fragile.