THE POLAR EXPRESS

This one is an easy yes for family movie night. The animation is superb, the adventures are thrilling, and four different children each learn something worth learning — confidence, humility, trust, and the title's "faith of a child." It's the kind of holiday film that earns its cheer honestly, through spectacle and story rather than sentiment alone.

Here's the cost, and it's real but narrow: this is a Christmas movie with no Jesus in it. The songs at the North Pole are all secular, and when Santa tells the hero that his trappings are "just symbols," the film never says what they're symbols of. It reaches for a universal message about belief and, in doing so, softens the very ending it's building toward.

Christians will still find plenty to appreciate in the moral lessons here — you'll just want to supply the "believe in what" yourself at home. Worth the trip, with a conversation to go with it.

On Christmas Eve, a boy with no faith in Santa Claus is startled to find a massive train stopped outside his window. An amiable conductor invites him aboard, bound for the North Pole. Once on board, he meets a confident young girl, a know-it-all boy, and a reluctant, poor boy who almost doesn't get on at all. Together they set off on a night of adventure — and a journey none of them expected.

Four stars, and the film earns every one of them on craft alone. The animation and effects are described as superb, giving the movie a look and feel unlike any other animated film. The train sequences — a boy walking atop a speeding car, a long curving slide, a train nearly running off its tracks — are full of thrilling, hairbreadth turns that make the middle stretch of the film genuinely exciting.

The character work holds up too: each of the four children is given a distinct arc and a real lesson to learn, which keeps the "adventure" from feeling like spectacle for its own sake. The only soft spot, by the source's own account, is the ending — where the film's reach for universality costs it some emotional power it could otherwise have earned.

This is a film with a strong moral worldview, built plainly and sincerely: courage, humility, trust, and belief are each modeled through a different child, and none of it is played cynically. That's real, and it's rare enough in family entertainment to be worth celebrating on its own.

But the film's central word — "belief" — is left carefully unattached to anything. Santa Claus tells the hero that his bells and trappings are just symbols of Christmas, and the movie stops there, never showing what those symbols point to. For Christian viewers, the answer is obvious: the true gift of Christmas is Jesus Christ, given for our redemption. By reaching for a message broad enough to include every viewer's own version of "belief," the filmmakers traded away the specificity that would have made their ending land with real weight.

Parents can easily supply what the film leaves out. The story's ache — a boy who wants to believe in something bigger than himself — is a good place to start that conversation. Scripture answers that ache directly: "Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it" (Mark 10:15). The film gets the shape of childlike faith right; it just never says whom that faith is for.

This is a beautifully made, genuinely exciting holiday film that will delight kids and adults alike — and it hands parents a natural opening to talk about the Child whose birth Christmas actually celebrates. Take the trip, enjoy the ride, and finish the story around your own table. Worth the trip.