Best Thanksgiving movies of all time

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. 

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.

In the 1980s, Jim Henson designed, and even built, creatures for a Thanksgiving-themed special that never ended up happening. Twenty-five years after his death, the puppets were exhumed from storage, spruced up and finally given their spotlight. That backstory is probably better than the movie, but it still contains a good deal of Henson charm, as two screen-raised city kids celebrating the holiday at their aunt’s rural, tech-free cottage get bored and decide to investigate a local legend. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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).

Move the Christmas episode of The Bear up a month and you basically have this 1995 dramedy from Jodie Foster, in her second directorial effort. Holly Hunter is a single, freshly unemployed mother forced to process her newfound joblessness over Thanksgiving dinner with her feuding siblings (Robert Downey Jr and Cynthia Stevenson) and chain-smoking mother (Anne Bancroft). If you’ve seen, well, half the movies on this list, the dysfunction will seem familiar. But Hunter is magnificent, and Foster captures a family dynamic that feels truthful and lived-in rather than histrionic.

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.

Everyone has that relative they hope is either too hungover to make their flight out or simply too estranged to get invited to holiday dinner in the first place – because if they do show up, it’ll be like lighting a cherry bomb in the mashed potatoes. In the debut feature from Waves director Trey Edward Shults, that person is Aunt Krisha (Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ real-life aunt), a sixtysomething recovering drug addict hoping to atone for her past behaviour by cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the family she hasn’t seen in years. To say things don’t go as planned is a devastating understatement. Not a fun watch per se, but a poignant and still compassionate one. 

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.  

Now that we’ve determined Die Hard is definitively a Christmas movie, it’s time to ask: is Rocky a Thanksgiving movie? Sure, the timeline technically stretches across the entire holiday season. But the life-affirming relationship between the titular mumbly pugilist and his beloved Adrian hinges on a disastrous Turkey Day dinner in which her hothead brother chucks the bird out the window, forcing them on an impromptu first date at the ice-skating rink. The judges are unanimous: it counts! Yo, Adrian, pass the cranberries!

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.’

The parents are dazed, the kids are confused and no one knows how to talk to nor fuck each other in this ’70s-set portrait of pan-generational ennui from Ang Lee, based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel. A host of simmering issues in a well-off Connecticut community come to the fore over Thanksgiving weekend just as the titular weather event plunges the town into a deep freeze. Sounds glum, but it’s also morosely funny, and the cast — including Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood — is uniformly excellent.

While not expressly a Thanksgiving movie, the single most memorable scene related to the holiday, at least in ’90s cinema, belongs to the second movie of the first modern reboot of the ooky-spooky TV franchise. Stuck at summer camp and forced to perform in a play titled ‘A Turkey Named Brotherhood’, Christina Ricci’s Wednesday Addams stages a weird-kid revolt, delivering an anti-colonialist screed while dressed as Pocahontas before lighting the set on fire and spit-roasting a few counsellors. It’s not an exaggeration to say this is where a lot of kids learned about the ‘alternative history’ of America’s founding holiday. 

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.

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.  

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?  

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.

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.