The Ten Commandments (1923) Cecil B. DeMille’s career-making silent epic, quite stodgy and unimpressive today, but worthy a day in court if you’re sick of the colorful, bombastic 1956 version.

The Ten Commandments (1956) Over-the-top Bible epics used to be so much campy fun before Mel Gibson came along and got all preachy; we bet Easter dinner at the DeMille household was a lot more fun than at the Gibson ranch. Would Passover have been so entertaining over the years without televised visions of Charlton Heston’s chin, John Derek’s pecs, Anne Baxter’s pouty kitten lips, or Yvonne DeCarlo’s heaving cleavage? Even if you haven’t always been at shul, you know the deal – Moses, Pharaoh, Red Sea, Edward G. Robinson growling, "Where’s your messiah now?" – and know too that it’s a long enough movie to stretch over at least a few of the nights, if not all eight. "So it shall be written, so it shall be done."

Exodus (1960) Leon Uris’ bestselling magnum opus covered much more history than simply the struggle in the late ‘40s to establish a Jewish state, but you gotta give director Otto Preminger and long-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo a hand for trying to winnow it down to a dramatic throughline. As Passover viewing, this long (3½+ hours), rhapsodic, muddling tapestry is sure to strike an emotional chord, even if you remain troubled by the way the Mid-East has turned out since. Filmed on location in Cyprus and Israel, and starring Paul Newman as the perpetually pissed-off hero, Ari Ben Canaan.

Wholly Moses! (1980) As with Monty Python’s Life of Brian, this Mel Brooks-ish Old Testament parody trails after a schmuck (Dudley Moore) who was almost Moses. Low schtick, with Madeline Kahn, Jack Gilford, James Coco, and Richard Pryor as the Pharaoh. Director Gary Weis began doing hilarious shorts for Saturday Night Live in its infancy.

A Rugrats Passover (1994) As with A Rugrats Chanukah, this special episode celebrated American secular Jewishness in the wisest and most entertaining fashion, structured this time around Grandpa Boris regaling the kids with an epic, Pickles-style Exodus story.

The Prince of Egypt (1998) The kinderlach, their knowledge of Passover limited to macaroons and matzoh balls, are falling asleep waiting for Grandpa to get on with the plagues already – it was probably just such confusion at the Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg Seders that led to the creation of this cartoon Haggadah from DreamWorks. It’s quite dramatic and stirring and certainly a cut above many of the animated features that wind up being merchandised into our consciousness. Our kids were completely engrossed and acted as if they’d never heard the story before. The five-year-old said it best during the parting of the Red Sea: "Oh yeah! I want to be on Moses’s team!"

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) A conventional but heart-wrenching documentary about the shipment of some 10,000 European Jewish children from their families to England in the year prior to the invasion of Poland, where they waited out the war with foster families and then, afterwards, tried to return home. Other chest-swelling non-fiction portraits of life and survival in the Holocaust era – a fairly recent breed of documentary – include Fighter (2000), Shanghai Ghetto (2002), and The Danish Solution: The Rescue of the Jews in Denmark (2003).