‘Fly Away Home’

Carroll Ballard, who directed “The Black Stallion” and “Never Cry Wolf,” knows how to be both caring and restrained, minimizing a movie’s saccharine content while maximizing the sense of wonder. His 1996 “Fly Away Home” is a pleasant and high-spirited affair, one of the rare films that manages to be irresistible without resorting to emotional blackmail. Thrown together at a Southern Ontario farm by a family tragedy after a decade apart, a father (Jeff Daniels) and his 13-year-old daughter (Anna Paquin, pictured) have so little in common that the forging of any kind of relationship seems out of the question. An eccentric inventor-sculptor, Daniels is not ideal father material, but when rampaging developers tear up a nearby geese breeding ground, his daughter rescues an abandoned nest of eggs. Sixteen forthcoming baby geese bond father and daughter, but what to do when the birds begin to fly? (Cinemax Wednesday at 8 p.m.)