Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010)

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang arrives from 2010, a period fantasy comedy set on an English farm during the Second World War. Emma Thompson's wart-nosed governess materializes at the door of a harried mother, tames three boisterous children and two evacuated rich cousins, and presides over a harvest, a piglet chase, and the defusing of an unexploded German bomb. Susanna White directs with the brisk competence of a BBC Sunday afternoon. It is charming. It is British. It is a sequel to a nanny film, and it knows it.

The social inventory is thin. The cast is a solid wall of white British character actors, with Nonso Anozie briefly manning a War Office desk, and no agenda attaches to his presence. There is no LGBTQ+ content, no racial commentary, no environmental sermon, no body-acceptance arc, no neurodivergent character. Race, climate, and the anxious interiority of the modern self are simply not on the menu. A woman directs the picture, and a capable mother holds the farm together while her husband is at war, which lends a faint current of female competence without amounting to a statement. The snobbish city cousins and the pompous Lord Gray hint at rich-versus-honest-farmer friction, but the wealthy are redeemed in the third act and the grievance evaporates.

Nanny McPhee teaches five lessons, and the film announces each one, which gives the whole proceeding a mildly instructional air. The lessons themselves are ancient: courage, manners, cooperation, the primacy of family. No contemporary sermonizing clings to them. Two female assassins and a casino proprietress add a flicker of interest to the margins, though their function is chiefly to be outwitted by children and a jackdaw. We file this under harmless. A pleasant artifact from a gentler era of children's entertainment, carrying a small residue of female agency and some light grumbling about the rich, and nothing more.