For that big national birthday everybody's been talking about, The Royal set itself the challenge of assembling an all-day All-Canadian Canada Day program that didn't feel like an act of national duty to sit through. And boy did we: a hard rockin', high-flying, meatball-flinging Canada Day movie program for the rest of us.

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It figures that one of the very finest made-in-Canada family entertainments is not only firmly grounded in true-story reality but is as educational as it is entertaining. But that's Carroll Ballard's Fly Away Home, a fact-based account of a father-daughter rescue mission of endangered geese that's as visually gorgeous and modestly inspirational as it is winningly entertaining. As the father who pilots the airborne gizmo the orphaned geese will follow to a safer horizon, Jeff Daniels is adorably game for the mission, but it's as fiercely determined daughter Amy – just reunited with her father after her mother's sudden death – that Anna Paquin very nearly steals the movie from out under the geese. Nearly.