The 21 best Thanksgiving movies for your post-feast viewing

In real-life America, Thanksgiving is a day of feasting, football and friends and/or family. In the movies, however, the holiday is often presented as a painful obligation, one where long-simmering tensions frequently boil over at the dinner table. It’s for that reason that Planes, Trains and Automobiles persists as the only Thanksgiving movie most families actually want to watch around Thanksgiving. Sure, for travelphobes, John Hughes’ road-comedy of errors is basically a feature-length panic attack, but it serves to present the holiday as something worth fighting to get home for – because, ultimately, we should all be grateful just to have a place to go home to.

Woody Allen used the annual holiday meal – and Mia Farrow’s actual Central Park West apartment – as a repeated motif in one of his most sophisticated romantic comedies. Suffused with urbane chat and book-lined coziness, these scenes provide instant nostalgia for a generation of New Yorkers. Bonus T-day points: The movie is actually about giving thanks – to the people who love and endure you, to the fates that keep you healthy and to the Marx Brothers for providing a reason to live.

The film takes place in summer (and Charles Addams’s macabre family brings vibes closer to Halloween), but this sequel to Barry Sonnenfeld’s well-loved ‘90s reboot earns its place in the Thanksgiving canon thanks to its most memorable sequence. Stuck in a WASP-y summer camp, Christina Ricci’s Wednesday is forced to act in a strangely timed Thanksgiving pageant. Yet instead of breaking bread with pilgrims, her Pocahontas stages a scene of righteous retribution, sending pilgrim limbs flying and stage blood gushing during a massacre that would do Tarantino proud. The sequence also includes Pugsley delivering the line: ‘I am a turkey, kill me’ while dressed as a bird during a twisted musical number. 

A brittle Connecticut family comes together for its 1973 Thanksgiving weekend (laced with bad weather and marital recriminations) in Ang Lee's expert take on the Rick Moody novel. Christina Ricci, playing the subversive daughter, ruins the festive mood with her heavily politicized grace. As you’ll see further down the list, the young actress had a thing for Thanksgiving disruptions.

You’ve heard of slasher flicks – now how about a ‘carver’? It took 16 years, but Eli Roth eventually followed in the hallowed footsteps of Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun, turning his fake trailer from 2007’s Grindhouse into an actual movie. In the aftermath of a deadly Black Friday riot in Plymouth, Mass., a masked serial killer mask begins tracking down and plucking off survivors. It’s knowingly ridiculous, but it contains Roth’s uber-gory set pieces and sick humour.  

Assimilation chafes with tradition in Barry Levinson’s magnificent evocation of 1950s Jewish life in Baltimore, a movie with a heartbreaker of a Thanksgiving argument. ‘You cut the turkey without me?’ fumes an uncle late to the feast, as family tensions spill over into a fierce front-lawn confrontation.

Spike Lee’s essential indie debut boasts a snippy Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the lovely Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), who invites three suitors to the same Brooklyn table. Lee’s Mars Blackmon steals the night with his Jesse Jackson story and the retort, ‘What do you know? You're a Celtics fan.’

There are stressful Thanksgiving dinners, then there’s the feast at the center of indie powerhouse Krisha, the story of a family gathering completely disrupted by the return of an estranged aunt. We won’t reveal exactly how this grounded, gut-wrenching and semi-autobiographical film frays the nerves with such efficiency, but suffice to say that the family dinner at its centre somehow makes director Trey Edward Shults’s harrowing follow-up, It Comes At Night, seem welcoming… and that movie was an apocalyptic horror film, not a family drama set on Turkey Day. 

Jodie Foster’s sophomore directorial effort is an ode to dysfunction that we all endure in the name of Thanksgiving, with Holly Hunter playing a single mom reuniting with her sparring blue-collar family over pumpkins pie and gravy. More grounded than the Griswolds and considerably less funny, the family at the center nonetheless brings the charm thanks to likable performances by Robert Downey Jr, Claire Danes and Anne Bancroft. It’s a slight film, but one that still hits close enough to home to warrant a revisit. 

It’s the role that finally won Al Pacino an Oscar and the moment where his descent into hoo-hahing parody began. But Scent of a Woman is still a fair bit better than its awards-bait reputation, and Pacino is damn good as Frank Slade, a bitter, retired army colonel who lost his sight in a grenade-juggling stunt gone wrong (that’s right). He plans to kill himself after a debaucherous Thanksgiving weekend – until an unlikely friendship with a college student (Chris O’Donnell) causes him to reconsider.

At the end of her run on Dawson’s Creek, Katie Holmes shook off any lingering teen-drama pigeonholing in this well-regarded indie dramedy, stepping into the role of a punky black sheep trying to prove her worth to her family by hosting Thanksgiving dinner. Of course, nothing goes right – her oven breaks, her apartment in general is small and run-down, and her mother is dying from breast cancer – but it builds to a genuinely touching conclusion that’s sweet without being cloying.

All hail the reigning champion of modern sports-underdog stories, in which a Philly bruiser (Sylvester Stallone, never this good again until Creed) gets a shot at the title – as opposed to, say, a one-way ticket to Palookaville. See it again just to relive the saddest Thanksgiving scene ever captured for a Hollywood film, one in which a turkey is flung out the front door by a furious Burt Young.

Other than when it was filmed – November 25, 1976 – Martin Scorsese’s document of the final concert performed by roots-rockers The Band doesn’t have all that much to do with Thanksgiving. But the date of their last gig, held at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, is certainly no coincidence: despite being majority Canadian, the group understood America and its music better than most. And the litany of cameos does resemble an extended family gathering, with guests flying in from all over the country. Hey, Uncle Neil’s here! What’s that all over his nose?  

There's something quite lethal about Parker Posey in pearls, and for that alone, director Mark Waters deserves our gratitude. The film plays like The Rocky Horror Picture Show rewritten by August Strindberg and Oliver Stone: Josh Hamilton brings his fiancée Tori Spelling home to meet the family and the glamorous Jackie-O, as Posey styles herself. This film is quite insane, very arch and viciously funny (from a play by Wendy MacLeod).

Arlo ‘son of Woody’ Guthrie wrote perhaps the only enduring Thanksgiving comedy song of the pre-Adam Sandler era, so it only made sense that the singer starred in an Arthur Penn-directed film adaptation. Guthrie plays himself as a hippie hitchhiking back to his home back east, where he’s tasked with making an ill-fated dump run after Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a mixed bag and hard to find, but it remains a fascinating relic of cinema’s emerging countercultural boom. Plus, the song still holds up. 

More and more, this seems like the definitive Woody Allen comedy, a perfect balance of nebbishment and nourishment. Mia Farrow is virtually unrecognizable as a big-haired, brassy mob dame in love with a has-been Italian singer whose career the Woodman, playing a small-time manager, is trying desperately to ignite. A crucial scene with all of Danny’s loser clients assembled in his apartment for a frozen-turkey dinner is heartbreakingly sweet.

Something like Pieces of April if it was somehow more traumatic, Stephen Karam’s self-adaptation of his Tony-winning one-act play gathers an ensemble cast in a dilapidated New York apartment for a Thanksgiving feast that inevitably devolves into an airing of grievances and dark family secrets. Richard Jenkins, Steven Yeun, Beanie Feldstein and, surprisingly, Amy Schumer carry a heavy acting load, maintaining the stage play’s brutal intimacy.  

This compassionate indie revolves around precocious teenage boarding schooler Oscar (Aaron Stanford) returning home to Manhattan for Thanksgiving. Oscar has a crush on his charming stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), but his dogged, patently misguided offensive to win her heart falters after he gets drunk and mistakenly sleeps with Eve’s sexually voracious friend, Diane (a dynamite Bebe Neuwirth). Overlook the low-budget, DV-shot visuals.

After sharing a lovely Thanksgiving dinner, two rural Pennsylvania families discover that their young daughters have gone missing – possibly the victims of kidnapping. Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman star in this frequently engrossing and decidedly downbeat thriller directed by Denis Villeneuve (also of Sicario and Dune). It might not be the one to watch after your meal, but remember it for later.

Once-promising actress turned lush Alex (Jane Fonda) wakes up on Thanksgiving Day to find, in her bed, a dead man with a knife through his heart. She panics and tries to flee the state, but thwarted by airport bureaucracy, ends up taking her chances with redneck ex-cop Turner (Jeff Bridges). Focusing on the central character's struggle toward a tentative moral redemption, director Sidney Lumet creates a film that's more intense than tense – the kind of character study that wizardly actors turn into triumphs.

No, this Chicken Run riff that replaces chickens with turkeys and Aardman’s stop-motion magic with gaudy computer animation is not a holiday classic. It’s actually quite awful But given all the dysfunction, drama and depression laid out in the above films, we figured we’d inject this turkey with something a little lighter. Consider this a good distraction for the kids in the house while you let the tryptophan do its thing.