On its own good-natured terms, "Selena" is both pleasant to watch and instructive in familiarizing a movie audience with the Texan-Mexican borderland music known as Tejano.
It is instructive to compare this movie's Aron Ralston with Christopher McCandless, another real-life explorer whose unhappy encounter with the vast American wilderness was the subject of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild".
The pleasures and limitations of these movies are instructive, since each provides a snapshot of commercial filmmaking in 21st-century Hollywood.
And then, among memorably instructive sibling groups, the movies give us the Corleones, for whom, as much as the root tragedy of the royal family of Thebes was the unspeakable act of incest, the root tragedy is the unspeakable crime of the usurpation of birth order: "I'm your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!.
And, in that sense, "Burton and Taylor" is instructive about how to make a movie about outsize movie stars.
Millman sees another value altogether: Many classic romance movies can be instructive, even therapeutic, in helping us understand our romantic attractions and disappointments.
"And the result is a movie that is funny, instructive and also intangibly charming".
It was also, he said, an instructive sight in light of the movie, which suggests cosmetic surgery is both fundamentally suspect and always possible to detect.
The latter of these is very instructive when you consider how a movie theater chain might fit into the Amazon pantheon.
And it's instructive to recall the political era in which the movie was made.
