In an age when children barely read books, let alone furrow the brow to foreign art movies, a family trip to see subtitled cinema might seem counterintuitive. But it’s actually an ideal way to develop their reading skills, as well as to hotwire the rhythms and cadences of foreign languages directly into their brains.

We started young with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the martial arts helped), moving on to Miyazaki animations in the original Japanese and later, for teenaged fare, French thrillers. All were great successes, and surely paved the way for learning languages (finally!) as part of the secondary school curriculum.

One word of warning to parents. Subtitled films that are in black and white may be a sensory deprivation too far and reek of what to the mind of a child is that most terrible of crimes: old age. So, though you might hope that they would thrill to Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups — and there is a chance, since it’s a film about an adolescent boy — you’re best trying that later.

Curse of the Golden Flower is the latest candidate for our now teenaged son’s eyes, a way of absorbing Mandarin by stealth. It has fewer fight scenes than its predecessors, House of Flying Daggers and Hero , but it is visually ravishing and hinges on the grotesquely unfair actions of an unbendingly autocratic paterfamilias, the Emperor Ping. Now that’s surely something any child can at times identify with.

Do your children watch subtitled films?

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