[specious_reasons]

Since I got my Mom a TV that can stream movies from various services, and my Mom loves horses, the at-home care workers have been finding horse movies for her to watch.

Since I'm visiting, I have also been subjected to a few of them.

Hearts & Horses (2023) - A simple, god-fearing farmer discovers he has a 16 year old daughter when her mother dies. He takes her in and sets her to work taking care of abandoned horses.

Wright family films is literally the Wright family making films. All of the actors here are members of the Wright family. IIRC, they made a bit of a social media splash by making a Christian Bigfoot movie a while back. This is entirely incompetent, especially not providing a lot of horse screen time.

All Good Things 2019 - Two city-dwelling teen girls are forced to visit with their grandparent's remote farm over the holidays. The grandparents run a horse therapy farm, and the girls are quickly enchanted with the horses and eventually the whole farm. Unfortunately the grandparents are about to lose the farm to a corrupt businessman on Christmas Eve.

This was only marginally better than the one above. It did have the advantage of having Morgan Fairchild and Corbin Bernsen as the grandparents, and a competent cinematographer, but was otherwise terrible. Unfortunately, this movie forgot the horses for long stretches, and so it doesn't deliver enough horse screen time.

Midnight Stallion 2013 - Struggling farm owners and their daughter form a bond with an impressive wild stallion, and they literally bet the farm on it to win a race.

This is the most competent of the three. The plot is almost entirely predictable, but that's not a terrible thing - it knows what kind of movie it is. Kris Kristofferson is the crusty old farmer, and Kristofferson > Bernsen. This also provided the best on-screen horse time with lots of black stallion running through open fields scenes.

I wouldn't voluntarily watch any of these again, but if someone was looking for a horse movie, I'd confidently recommend Midnight Stallion as one that doesn't suck.