Thanksgiving and Film!

Four hundred years have passed since the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in Virginia. There have been plenty of tough times in the interim, but 2020 has provided more than its share of challenges. So, as the citizens of the United States ponder quite what they have to be thankful for, Cinema Paradiso looks back at how Hollywood has marked what has come to be known as Turkey Day.

As Hayley Mills was quick to point out in David Swift's Disney adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1960), we have lots of reasons to be glad. But being thankful at the end of a year of pandemic, racial prejudice and political upheaval might prove a bit tricky for Americans who may not be in the mood either to recall the romance between Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) in Terrence Malick's The New World (2005) or to show due gratitude to Benjamin Gates (Nicolas Cage) for protecting the Declaration of Independence in Jon Turteltaub's National Treasure (2004).

Millions Stateside will seek to rediscover the spirit of the last Thursday in November by watching Bill Melendez's Emmy-winning adaptation of Charles M. Schultz's beloved Peanuts strip, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973). But this isn't the only cartoon reminder of the significance of this state-enshrined day of reflection, as four episodes of The Simpsons (1989-) demonstrate. If 'Bart vs Thanksgiving' (Season 2, 1990), 'Homer vs Dignity' (Season 12, 2000), 'Homer the Moe' (Season 13, 2001) or 'Thanksgiving of Horror' (Season 31, 2019) don't put you in the mood, you could always try the Family Guy (1999-) alternatives, as the Griffins go all T-Day in 'Thanksgiving' (Season 10, 2011), 'Happy Turkey Day' (Season 13, 2014), 'Peter's Sister' (Season 14, 2015) and 'Shanksgiving' (Season 18, 2019).

But Thanksgiving isn't solely marked on the small screen by animated characters, of course. Cinema Paradiso users can also wallow in some classic Friends (1994-2004), with 'The One With All the Thanksgivings' (Season 5, 1998) and 'The One With the Rumour' (Season 8, 2001). Similarly not to be missed is 'The Thanksgiving Decoupling' (Season 7, 2013), a standout episode of The Big Bang Theory (2007-19). Or, if you prefer something with a little more edge, there's always the 'He Is Risen' (Season 3, 2001) episode of The Sopranos (2000-07). And never forget that TV shows and features alike always look sharper on a high-quality DVD or Blu-ray from Cinema Paradiso than on any streaming service.

Making a Drama

While the earliest film-makers realised that Thanksgiving scenes could help them turn a topical dollar, surprisingly few features made during the Golden Age of Hollywood actually depicted the November festivities. Part of the reason lay in the fact that not everyone could afford a turkey with all the trimmings during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nevertheless, every magazine worth its salt commissioned snaps of the major stars carving a plump bird or baking a pumpkin pie. Moreover, the studio heads were shrewd enough to recognise that Thanksgiving was the perfect time to release their most prestigious pictures, as virtually the entire country went to the cinema as a holiday weekend treat.

Of course, it didn't help matters that the states hadn't always marked the occasion on the same date. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt further muddied the waters in 1939 by making Thanksgiving the penultimate Thursday in November before switching back to the last Thursday two years later. Consequently, it wasn't until after the Second World War that the celebration began to crop up on screen more regularly, although few remember that George Seaton's Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), begins with the Thanksgiving Day Parade at Macy's department store in New York. Contractual obligations meant that the scene had to shift to the fictional Cole's store in Les Mayfield's 1994 remake, in which Richard Attenborough took over as Kris Kringle from the Oscar-winning Edmund Gwenn.

Nine years elapsed before Hollywood produced another memorable Thanksgiving moment in George Stevens's Oscar-winning take on Edna Ferber's bestseller, Giant (1956). During a trip home to the Lynnton estate in Maryland, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) introduces her three children to the family members who had disapproved of her marrying Texan rancher, Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), The kids become attached to a turkey named Pedro and there are tears when they discover the awful truth about his fate at the Thanksgiving table.

Much to the distress of Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire), the bird gets hauled out of the window by her brother, Paulie (Burt Young), in John G. Avildsen's Rocky (1976). However, his boxer buddy Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) makes amends by reminding her that Thanksgiving is just another Thursday and taking her ice-skating at a deserted rink. While the siblings are squabbling, Rocky watches TV and sees world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) extend a challenge to all-comers for a bout to mark the start of the American Bicentennial. Without giving too much away, the showdown ended in such controversy that a rematch was arranged for Thanksgiving the following year in the Stallone-directed, Rocky II (1979).

If the movies are to be believed, stand-up rows are all the rage at Thanksgiving, as Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) and Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan) demonstrate in a combustible knife-wielding sequence from Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991). There are also tensions between New England prep schooler Charlie Simms (Chris O'Donnell) and Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (Al Pacino) in Martin Brest's Scent of a Woman (1992), but the fireworks are detonated in a much more controlled manner, as the blind retiree reluctantly heads to New York for a family dinner.

The Big Applie is also the destination for Eliza D'Amico (Hope Davis) in Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers (1996) after she finds a note to another woman from her husband, Louis (Stanley Tucci), and bundles parents Jim (Pat McNamara) and Rita (Anne Meara), sister Jo (Parker Posey) and her boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber) into her station wagon for an eventful post-Thanksgiving trip from Long Island to Manhattan. Marital ties also come under strain in the Hood household in Ang Lee's adaptation of Rick Moody's novel, The Ice Storm (1997), as Elena (Joan Allen) learns that husband Ben (Kevin Kline) is cheating on her with their neighbour, Janey (Sigourney Weaver). Moreover, daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci) has started showing an interest in Janey's sons, Mikey (Elijah Wood) and Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd).

In Carl Franklin's measured take on Anna Quindlen's novel, One True Thing (1998), George Gulden (William Hurt) also demonstrates a lack of tact when he brings two writer buddies home to eat, despite knowing that this is likely to be the last Thanksgiving that he and daughter Ellen (Renée Zellwegger) will get so spend with cancer-stricken wife and mother, Kate (Meryl Streep). The Big C also looms over Sara Dreever (Charlize Theron), as she embarks upon a whirlwind romance with Nelson Moss (Keanu Reeves) in Pat O'Connor's Sweet November (2001), a remake of an unjustly neglected 1968 Robert Ellis Miller film of the same name that had teamed Sandy Dennis and Anthony Newley.

Dinner time provides the setting for a couple of short scenes in a couple of 2002 dramas. Jerome Davenport (Denzel Washington) urges Antwone (Derek Luke) to reconnect with his family in Denzel Washington's Antwone Fisher, while images of Edward Sumner (Richard Gere) carving a turkey are intercut with the discovery at a dump of the corpse of love rival Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez) in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful (2002), which was inspired by Claude Chabrol's superior 1968 French thriller, The Unfaithful Wife, in which the ménage is comprised of Michel Bouquet, Stéphane Audran and Maurice Ronet.

The turkey turns to ashes for Wyoming sheepherders Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) when they go their separate ways for the holidays in Ang Lee's four-time Oscar-winning adaptation of Annie Proulx's bestseller, Brokeback Mountain (2005). While Ennis confides to ex-wife Alma (Michelle Williams) that he is more than just good friends with Jack, the latter finds himself insulting wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and getting into a heated discussion with father-in-law, L.D. Newsome (Graham Beckel). By contrast, a seasonal tragedy has a unifying effect in Four Brothers (2005), John Singleton's urban reworking of Henry Hathaway's 1965 Western, The Sons of Katie Elder, as siblings Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), Jeremiah (André Benjamin), Angel (Tyrese Gibson) and Jack (Garrett Hedlund) join forces after their adoptive mother, Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan), is gunned down while doing her Thanksgiving shop.

Violence has an equally detrimental effect on Lieutenant Colonel Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), when he returns from a psychologically scarring tour of duty in Iraq in Irwin Winkler's Home of the Brave (2006) and promptly upsets his family by drunkenly inviting three strangers for Thanksgiving dinner. Moreover, he also rants about the War Against Terrror and rips out his son's lip ring before threatening to shoot himself. A 19 year-old Marine named Mike (Nick Cannon) has yet to ship out to Iraq in Neil Abramson's American Son (2008) and he spends a four-day holiday furlough in Bakersfield, California trying to (re) build bridges with parents Eddie (Chi McBride) and Donna (April Grace), best buddy Jake (Matt O'Leary) and new girlfriend, Christina (Melonie Diaz).

The editing of Pietro Scalia makes the Thanksgiving scene so potent in Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007), as the action cross-cuts between drug baron Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) carving a large turkey for his happy family and the children of the addicts he supplies with Blue Magic cocaine weeping over the bodies of their convulsing parents. An idyllic scene also turns sour in Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners (2013), when young friends Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) and Joy (Kyla-Drew Simmons) go missing while Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his wife, Grace (Maria Bello), are celebrating with neighbours Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy Birch (Viola Davis).

Alice Howland (the Oscar-winning Julianne Moore) is also about to go missing in a very different way in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Still Alice (2014), as her creeping Alzheimer's means that she is finding it increasingly difficult to put names to faces, even in the case of her own daughter, Lydia (Kristen Stewart). But we end this section on a happier note, as Sandra Bullock contributes her own Oscar-worthy performances to John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side (2009), as interior designer Leigh Anne Tuohy invites foster care fugitive Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) to share Thanksgiving with her husband, Sean (Tim McGraw), and their children S.J. (Jae Head) and Collins (Lily Collins). Try keeping a dry eye, we dare you.

Tunes'n'Toons

Where else could you begin a round-up of festive family favourites than with Mark Sandrich's Holiday Inn (1942). For once, though, it's not Bing Crosby's rendition of Irving Berlin's Oscar-winning 'White Christmas' that beckons, but the animated gag about 'Franksgiving'. Remember, we mentioned President Roosevelt switching Thursdays? Well, here a confused turkey hops between the calendar squares for the 20 and 27 November before looking up into the camera and shrugging its wings.

A turkey named Gregory finds himself the centre of attention in David Butler's By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953), as Wesley Whitfield (Billy Gray) refuses to allow his pet to be sacrificed to feed parents George (Leon Ames) and Alice (Rosemary DeCamp) and sister Marjorie (Doris Day), who is being courted by both Great War hero Bill Sherman (Gordon MacRae) and songwriting milksop Chester Finley (Russell Arms). This kind of jamboree typifies the Americana that inspired the music of The Band, whose fabled farewell concert took place on Thanksgiving in 1976 and was captured in The Last Waltz (1978) by a promising young director named Martin Scorsese. Whatever happened to him? If you want to know more about the combo that made its name as Bob Dylan's backing group, check out Daniel Roher's Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019).

Two of cartoonland's favourite sons fail to reach a Thanksgiving truce as a hungry newcomer named Nibbles comes to stay in William Hanna and Joseph Barbera's The Little Orphan (1949). This is the fifth of the seven Oscar-winning shorts starring Tom and Jerry and Cinema Paradiso users can find it on Volume 2 of The Tom and Jerry Classic Collection. A clutch of somewhat larger outsiders descend on New York intent on finding the Natural History Museum in We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), which was adapted by Phil Nibbelink, Simon Wells, and Dick and Ralph Zondag from a children's picture book by Hudson Talbott. During the course of their journey, Rex the orange Tyrannosaurus, Woog the blue Triceratops, Elsa the purple Pteranodon and Dweeb the green Parasaurolophus have to disguise themselves as attractions in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. However, things start to go wrong when Rex mistakes an Apatosaurus balloon for the real thing.

A spot of time travelling will also be required if Reggie (Owen Wilson) and Turkey Freedom Front activist Jake (Woody Harrelson) are going to return to the first Thanksgiving in order to change the menu in Jimmy Hayward's Free Birds (2013). And for those whose minds immediately turn to Lynyrd Skynyrd on hearing that title, why not rent Muscle Shoals (2013), Greg 'Freddy' Camalier's fascinating documentary about the Alabama studio that was used by the Jacksonville combo and which was home to a peerless session band named The Swampers?

Thrillers and Chillers

If you look carefully at the newspaper being read at the US Intelligence Agency in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1958), you will realise that the unfolding events involving Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) must play out over the Thanksgiving period, as the front page is dated Tuesday 25 November 1958. As far as we are aware, fleeing from cropduster planes and hanging off Mount Rushmore have not become holiday traditions. But we can guarantee that the best way to ensure that each twist and turn in this Hitch chase classic is crystal clear is by watching them on a Cinema Paradiso DVD or Blu-ray.

Leaping forward a couple of decades, we come to one of the very few Thanksgiving films to have been confiscated by the British police as part of their crackdown on so-called 'video nasties'. Focusing on the killing spree perpetrated by escaped PCP addict Jay Jones (Jake Steinfield) after he stumbles across the party being hosted by rancher Harold Bradley (Don Edmonds), Nettie Peña's Home Sweet Home (1981) is also a rare example of an 80s slasher that was directed by a woman. Released two years later, John Grissmer's Blood Rage centres on another escapee becoming an unwelcome guest at a holiday feast, as Todd Simmons (Mark Soper) makes for the Shadow Woods apartment complex where his mother, Maddy (Louise Lasser), lives with his twin, Terry (also Soper), who had framed him a decade earlier for a slaying at a drive-in movie.

Elizabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy) has also been institutionalised for the last 10 years, although psychiatrist Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas) suspects that she is faking some of her symptoms. However, when his daughter is kidnapped by criminal Patrick Koster (Sean Bean) in Gary Fleder's reworking of Andrew Klavan's thriller, Don't Say a Word (2001), Conrad has to coax Elizabeth into remembering the numbers that will enable Koster to get hold of a priceless ruby. Dr Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) seems to be the one with a mental block in Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown (2011), a variation on Frenchman Didier Van Cauwelaert's novel that sees a conference trip to Berlin unravel over Thanksgiving, as Harris's wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), denies all knowledge of him after he is involved in an accident with cabby Gina (Diane Kruger).

It seems that superheroes are too busy to celebrate Thanksgiving. There is a notable exception, of course, as Sam Raimi slipped a T-Day scene into Spider-Man (2002). Arriving late after a confrontation with the Green Goblin, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) settles down to dine with roommate Harry Osborn (James Franco), who is dating Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). However, Harry wants to introduce her to his father, Norman (Willem Dafoe), who just happens to be the Green Goblin and he realises Parker's secret identity when he sees him bleeding from a wound in precisely the same place where he had cut Spidey.

Eli Roth contributes the mischievous 'Thanksgiving' trailer to Grindhouse (2007), the exploitation double bill that is made up of Quentin Tarantino's 'Death Proof' and Robert Rodriguez's 'Planet Terror'. But it's found footage from various holidays, including Thanksgiving, that provides the evidence in Christopher Denham's Home Movie (2008) that all is not well with Jack (Austin Williams) and Emily (Amber Joy Williams), the 10 year-old twins of upstate New Yorkers, David (Adrian Pasdar) and Clare Poe (Cady McClain). However, no one is quite sure who to believe in Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Traitor (2008), as FBI Special Agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) keeps tabs on Sudanese-American, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), who has infiltrated the gang led by Omar (Saïd Taghmaoui), who is plotting to carry out 50 suicide bombings on buses across the United States on Thanksgiving Day.

Having become estranged from her family, a recovering addict (Krisha Fairchild) hopes to reconnect by cooking the Thanksgiving dinner in Trey Edward Shults's Krisha (2015). However, the strain of trying to keep her anxieties under control, while noting the close relationship that has developed between her son (Trey Edward Shults) and her sister (Robyn Fairchild) prompts Krisha to seek solace in drink and drugs. Leaving her comfort zone is also the goal that Zoey (Taylor Russell) sets herself after her college professor challenges her to do something that scares her in Adam Robitel's Escape Room (2019). But the timid student feels a distinct sense of unease when her roommate leaves for the Thanksgiving weekend and Zoey finds a box on her doorstep containing a note from her tutor and a puzzle cube.

We end this section as we began it with a tenuous link. But whether you watch Rian Johnson's Knives Out (2019) on DVD, Blu-ray or 4K, you will have to admit that there is something decidedly autumnal about the gardens of the Massachusetts mansion where private eye Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is striving to deduce who killed mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer).

Raise a Laugh and a Glass

There is no more poignant Thanksgiving scene in screen history than the one in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) that captures the Little Tramp dining off a boiled boot in a freezing cabin in the Klondike. How he would have loved to have been among the patrons in Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969), which sees folk singer Arlo Guthrie play himself as a Vietnam draft-dodger hoping to spend the holidays with his friends in the buttoned-down Massachusetts berg of Great Barrington.

It's a cinematic truism that things will almost certainly go wrong during a Thanksgiving meal. In Alan J. Pakula's Starting Over (1979), for example, Phil Potter (Burt Reynolds) upsets new girlfriend Marilyn Holmberg (Jill Clayburgh) when she overhears him calling her a 'family friend' during a phone call with his ex-wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen). At least the scene made the final cut, as there's no longer any trace of the infamous flashback to the college celebration in Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983) that featured Kevin Costner's Alex pondering the best way to carve the turkey.

The old gang starts to drift away from Woody Allen's eponymous talent agent in Broadway Danny Rose (1984), as clients including a one-legged tap dancer and a stuttering ventriloquist somehow get their big break and Danny (Allen) is left to host a mournful meal for remaining acts like lounge singer Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow). Two years later, Allen would use Thanksgiving for three pivotal scenes in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), as Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest) find ways to resolve their various issues. Allen would win the Academy Award for his screenplay, while Wiest and Michael Caine (who plays Hannah's husband, Elliot) would take home the Best Supporting statuettes.

As the old maxim has it, each family is unhappy in its own way and the Whitemans are awash with troubles in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). However, things become more complicated for Dave (Richard Dreyfus) and Barbara (Bette Midler) in this remake of Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) when the homeless Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte) tries to kill himself in their swimming pool. Four proves to be the crowd in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986), as Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) invites all three of the beaux competing for her attention - Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell) and Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) - to her Thanksgiving table and forces them to accept that she has the right to live according to her own rules.

Neal Page (Steve Martin) takes exception to the notion that two's company in John Hughes's Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), when he finds himself saddled with unwanted travelling companion Del Griffith (John Candy) after his holiday trip home to Chicago is rerouted to rural Kansas during a snowstorm. By way of recompense, Martin got to deliver the standout line in Herbert Ross's My Blue Heaven (1990), when Vinnie Antonelli attempts to convince the dubious Hannah Stubbs (Joan Cusack) that 'Thanksgiving is very big in Sicily' because so many émigrés from the island were forced to go home after being deported from the United States.

In arguing his case, Vinnie mentions turkey cacciatore. But it's slim pickings for George (Charles Grodin) and Alice Newton (Bonnie Hunt) and their children after the St Bernard they have adopted gets its paws on the turkey in Brian Levant's Beethoven (1992). Poor old Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) gets cast as the gobbling bird in a summer camp play about the first Thanksgiving in Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family Values (1993). Sister Wednesday (Christina Ricci) is no happier at being asked to play Pocahontas and drastically departs from the script to lead an uprising and set the camp on fire.

The same year saw things turn nasty down on the farm in Steve Rash's Son in Law (1993), as a stoner slacker named Crawl (Pauly Shore) offends the ultra-conservative father of his galpal, Becca (Carla Gugino), after she invites him to spend the holidays in South Dakota. Wily hustler Donald Sullivan (Paul Newman) is no more delighted in Robert Benton's Nobody's Fool (1994), when son Peter (Dylan Walsh) chooses Thanksgiving to come to the upstate New York backwater of North Bath in order to try and patch up their relationship now that he has lost his job and his marriage is heading for the rocks.

We don't want to give too much away in discussing the Thanksgiving scene in John Pasquin's The Santa Clause (1994), but it's safe to say that toy salesman Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) is about to discover that his job description has changed in a big way. The turkey salesman supplying Jodie Foster's Home For the Holidays (1995) must also have found himself busier than expected, as 64 birds were needed to shoot the dinner scene after Claudia Larsen (Holly Hunter) comes to regret jetting back to Baltimore from Chicago to catch up with parents Adele (Anne Bancroft) and Henry (Charles Durning) and siblings Tommy (Robert Downey, Jr.), and Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson).

Another dinner fails to go to plan in Nicholas Hytner's adaptation of Stephen McAuley's novel, The Object of My Affection (1998), as Nina Borowski (Jennifer Aniston) comes to wish she hadn't invited both gay teacher George Hanson (Paul Rudd) and actor Paul James (Amo Gulinello) to the party, as the chemistry between them breaks the heart of the latter's live-in mentor, Rodney Fraser (Nigel Hawthorne). Tensions also rise between rival booksellers Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), who have no idea that they are smitten chatroom buddies, in Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail (1998). However, the ice starts to thaw on Thanksgiving after Joe helps Kathleen in the cash-only line at a New York grocery store. Completing the 1998 triptych is the carefully posed scene in Mike Nichols's Primary Colors (1998) that sees Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson) beaming beside her Arkansas governor husband, Jack (John Travolta), as he carves the turkey on the lawn of the family home.

Moving into the new millennium, Gurinder Chadha serves up a tasty treat in What's Cooking?, as she shows how differently the four Los Angeles families led by Mercedes Ruehl (Latino), Joan Chen (Vietnamese), Kyra Sedgwick (Jewish) and Alfre Woodard (African American) mark Thanksgiving according to their own culinary customs. Despite being sisters, magazine editor Georgia (Diane Keaton), party planner Eve (Meg Ryan) and recently killed-off soap actress Maddy Mozell (Lisa Kudrow) almost feel like strangers when they reunite in Diane Keaton's Hanging Up (both 2000) to discuss how best to care for their dementia-afflicted father, Lou (Walter Matthau, who had shared a fine Thanksgiving scene with Jack Lemmon in Donald Petrie's Grumpy Old Men, 1993).

At the other end of the age range is 15 year-old Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford), the aspiring lothario in Gary Winick's Tadpole (2002), who intends using the Thanksgiving break to seduce chiropractor Diane Lodder (Bebe Neuwirth) in the hope that her best friend, who just happens to be his cardiologist stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), will get jealous and fall passionately in love with him. April Burns (Katie Holmes) hopes to do some maternal bonding of her own in Peter Hedges's Pieces of April (2003). But, with mother (Patricia Clarkson) travelling from Pennsylvania to Manhattan with the rest of April's estranged clan, she discovers that the oven in her cramped apartment is broken and she has to start meeting the neighbours in her Lower East Side building in order to prepare the repast.

Hedges clearly has a thing about Thanksgiving and the surname Burns, as the newspaper advice columnist of that name in Dan in Real Life (2007) travels to Rhode Island so that his three daughters can spend the holidays with their grandparents (John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest). Dan (Steve Carrell) has been widowed for four years and enjoys flirting with the stranger he bumps into in a bookstore. But his pleasure curdles when he discovers that Marie (Juliette Binoche) is the new girlfriend of his brother, Mitch (Dane Cook). While this delightful romcom is centred on the last week of November, it merely provides a running gag in Christopher Guest's razor-sharp satire on the movie business, For Your Consideration (2006), as smarmy studio boss Martin Gibb (Ricky Gervais) insists on changing the title of the little indie picture that is generating Oscar buzz for star Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) from Home For Purim to Home For Thanksgiving, so that audiences don't think it's 'too Jewish'.

The toast made by dying stand-up comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is the highlight of Judd Apatow's Funny People (2009), as he reminds protégé Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) and his other guests to keep friends close and make the most of the time that will only go faster as they start getting older. However, Sandler is on less appealing form as the Sadelstein siblings in Dennis Dugan's Jack and Jill (2011), which not only made headlines for breaking Al Pacino's Oscar during a Thanksgiving game of stickball, but also for shredding the Golden Raspberry record book by becoming the first film to sweep the board in winning all 10 Razzie categories. How great a recommendation for a Cinema Paradiso rental is that?

We're bending the rules to accommodate Steve Carr's Paul Blart Mall Cop (2009), as it's set on Black Friday. But think how many people would have had their Thanksgiving weekend ruined if our anti-hero (Kevin James) hadn't been on hand to tackle the heist at the shopping complex in West Orange, New Jersey that just happens to be near where Thomas Alva Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson created some of the first moving images with the Kinetograph camera back in 1894. The Thanksgiving robbery chronicled in Brett Ratner's Tower Heist (2011) is devised by Josh Kovaks (Ben Stiller), Charlie Gibbs (Casey Affleck) and Enrique Dev'reaux (Michael Peña) to recoup the money stolen in the Ponzi scheme hatched by shifty Wall Street billionaire, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda). Amusingly, the producers owed a huge debt to Donald Trump, who gave permission for scenes to be filmed in some of his properties across New York.

Sadly, it's not currently possible to rent three droll Thanksgiving flicks: Shane Dawson's Not Cool (2014), Jenna Laurenzo's Lez Bomb and Ike Barinholtz's The Oath (2018). But you can see the latter director acting alongside Mindy Kaling in the Season One 'Thanksgiving' episode of The Mindy Project (2012-17). Moreover, Cinema Paradiso users can revel in the Thanksgiving finale to Noah Baumbach's Mistress America (2015), as college fresher Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) treats Brooke Cardinas (Greta Gerwig) to a slap-up supper to apologise for the way in which she had depicted her in a short story. If you take away nothing else from this article, never forget that 'Being a beacon of hope for lesser people is a lonely business.'

That concludes this article! Lastly, Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Cinema Paradiso!