There Are Only Thirteen Good Thanksgiving Movies

Photographs: Everett Collection; Collage: Gabe Conte

Though it’s arguably the most American holiday this side of Independence Day, Thanksgiving often gets short shrift from popular culture. Even one of America’s most visible Thanksgiving traditions—the Macy’s parade—builds to the upstaging appearance of Santa Claus. It’s no wonder, then, that so many lists of the best Thanksgiving movies fudge the definition to include films that are really about the season as a whole (Holiday Inn) or even directly Christmas-centric (Miracle on 34^th Street is not a Thanksgiving movie, list-makers!)

This year, Eli Roth has moved the needle on that, however mildly, with the first wide-release Thanksgiving horror movie in ages, titled—with admirable directness—Thanksgiving. But the truth is, there were already plenty of low-rent Thanksgiving slashers for horror fans to peruse. It’s a lot harder to find Thanksgiving movies that address the holiday as more than a hooky gimmick – and even harder for those movies to endure the way their Christmas counterparts have. (There’s a decent crop of minor yet delightful Christmas-set rom-coms from the 1940s, for example – essentially more sophisticated versions of today’s Hallmark-marathon programmers, featuring actual movie stars – but far fewer revolving around the presumably less romantic Turkey Day.) With this in mind, we’ve done the hard work of assembling seven decades’ worth of genuinely good Thanksgiving-themed movies, offering a tour through the holiday’s joys and trials starting from the middle of the 20^th century.

Thanksgiving pictures, even the comedies, tend to be less ebullient than their Christmas counterparts, focusing as they do on bittersweet reunions, fraught homecomings, complicated family dynamics, and the ongoing question of whether our rituals sustain us or remind us of what we’ve lost in the spaces between them. The good news is plentiful, though: These movies aren’t quite so overplayed, many of them are semi-hidden gems, and there’s few enough to marathon them all before the big day. Here are thirteen key titles, arranged chronologically.

The Very Thought of You (1944)

The few Thanksgiving-themed movies you can dig up from the first few decades of American cinema tend to use the holiday more incidentally—or, as in this romantic drama, as a respite from bigger, thornier issues. Here, a shift in assignment allows a couple of World War II soldiers (Dennis Morgan and Dane Clark) to take a holiday weekend break in Pasadena before shipping back out for more training and another tour of duty. While there, David Stewart (Morgan) reconnects with old crush Janet Wheeler (Eleanor Parker) – much to her family’s dismay, in part because they’ve seen how Janet’s sister steps out on her own overseas soldier beau. Director Delmer Daves uses the limited time frame of a Thanksgiving weekend as a stand-in for the precious little time these soldiers have to conduct their personal business, and this early on, the movies were already subverting images of familial togetherness: the movie’s tense dinner scene is actually on the night before Thanksgiving, while Janet is so besotted with David that she winds up missing her family’s day-of gathering entirely. Later, the reappearance of Janet’s brother-in-law addresses includes his reassessment of Americana: “You know those advertisements that show pictures of guys in uniform coming back to what they left? They don’t show what home really means. To some guys maybe it is apple pie, the smell of home cooking, the corner drugstore... but to lots of others it’s their girl.” Are these characters subsisting on brief flashes of happiness that they know from the start have a time limit, or is life actually lived in those little unexpected bursts? The Very Thought of You may prioritize domestic melodrama and reconciliation over really grappling with these questions – and that still doesn’t keep it from providing unusual insight before the credits roll. This one isn’t currently available to stream legally, but keep an eye on Turner Classic Movies, which keeps it in occasional circulation.

By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953)

Though there haven’t been all that many great Thanksgiving movies, there have been a number of memorable Thanksgiving-themed sitcom episodes – and this silly and sweet-natured Doris Day semi-musical from 1953 feels like a precursor to that tradition. Like The Very Thought of You and a lot of other Thanksgiving cinema, it involves a return home – in this case, a World War I soldier (Gordon MacRae) returning home to an uncertain, see-sawing relationship with his progressive-minded sweetheart (Doris Day) as her family prepares for a big Thanksgiving get-together. There’s also a subplot about Day’s little brother (Billy Gray) becoming attached to the turkey the family has been feeding in preparation for a seasonal butchering. The movie is episodic and a little rambling, with one source of conflict introduced out of nowhere around the halfway mark; it’s also the kind of modestly scaled musical that’s been relegated to indie movies (if at all), with mostly diegetic songs performed by a winning Day (who is weirdly convincing as a fresh-faced 18-year-old despite being fully 30 here). It’s very much the 1950s family-antics version of the many Christmas-themed lightly comic melodramas of the 1940s, buoyed by songs, sincerity, and the occasional cartoon sound effects.

Alice’s Restaurant (1969)

Those old enough to remember terrestrial radio may recall that many stations traditionally play Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute, draft-satirizing opus “Alice’s Restaurant” on Thanksgiving, the holiday where its action is set. Even some of those olds, however, may not be aware that not only was the song turned into a narrative feature starring Guthrie as himself, it was director Arthur Penn’s follow-up to his galvanizing 1967 crime picture Bonnie and Clyde, which helped kick off the New Hollywood movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Alice’s Restaurant is not often cited as a lynchpin of this movement, and with good reason. It’s not Bonnie and Clyde, or The Graduate, or anything else on the level of those masterpieces. It is, however, a valuable time capsule that inverts the Thanksgiving coming-home narrative and the soldier-back-from-war narrative, with Guthrie hitting the road in an attempt to avoid the draft, and getting into trouble with a loose community of found-family semi-hippies while occasionally stopping off to visit his dying father Woody (who does not appear as himself). Though the younger Guthrie isn’t exactly a rock star, there’s still a touch of moonlighting-singer false modesty to his self-portrayal as a sweet, unassuming guy. Yet he’s also fairly convincing in that part, and while the movie has plenty of room for lovable antics, Penn doesn’t shortchange the complexities and sadness of his characters. Arlo finds a communal sense of love and gratitude, but that doesn’t make it any more stable or lasting than any number of traditional families. In dramatizing an 18-minute folk song at six times the length, it gains some additional depth of feeling.

The Last Waltz (1978)

Let’s be clear: This list is sticking to movies that actually have some kind of direct connection to Thanksgiving, which means skipping over those that might feel thematically or aesthetically fitting, eliminating any family dramas, football pictures, or food movies if they don’t have some semblance of November chill or holiday trimmings. Without those restrictions, there are any number of Martin Scorsese pictures that make fine Thanksgiving viewing, from the engrossing marathons of Casino and The Irishman (both of which originally played theaters during the holiday) to the food-heavy comfort-watch of Goodfellas to the family-film warmth of Hugo (another Thanksgiving release in its day!) to his new Killers of the Flower Moon and its sobering look at American history splattered with blood and racism toward indigenous people (among others). For sticklers, Scorsese’s filmography does include one great Thanksgiving-set movie to put on and soundtrack your meal prep (or couch fugue): His concert movie The Last Waltz, featuring his pals in The Band. The only problem is that its guest might outshine yours, given that it includes not just the late Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko, but Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ringo Starr, and Muddy Waters, among others. OK, that’s not much of a problem. The music makes for a great cooking soundtrack, and Scorsese’s casual interviews provide just enough unaffected color and reminiscence without turning it all into a history lesson. The sound of a band calling it quits can still keep you company.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Look, I understand if you don’t want to invite Woody Allen into your home for the holidays. But his movies feature terrific work from a whole lot of people, and here Allen himself is positioned closer to the periphery, at least compared to some of his other work of this era. He’s all over Broadway Danny Rose, for example, a comedy from just two years earlier that also has a Thanksgiving scene. Hannah and Her Sisters returns to that holiday, indicating Allen’s tendency to self-recycle even in his best work, and on its surface, this movie has plenty more where that came from: Lots of extramarital affairs, dithering about extramarital affairs, unintentional partner-swapping, existential crises, insistent and self-glorifying men presenting as irresistible to multiple women, and so on. But by weaving together the stories of three sisters played by Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, and Dianne Wiest, moving inexorably forward in a way that allows the film to begin and end on Thanksgiving, with another (and emotionally pivotal) Thanksgiving around the two-thirds mark, the film takes on an almost novelistic structure, and the various parts wind up strengthening the whole. The Thanksgiving scenes themselves feel very Upper East Side – moneyed, overpopulated with friends of the family, with major contributions from the Help as the elderly parents sing sentimental songs at the piano. There are passed hors d'oeuvres, for God’s sake, and nary a football game in sight. Yet placed as they are in this intentionally episodic narrative about people searching for a sense of satisfaction that may be out of reach, the movie also depicts how big holiday gatherings mark the passage of time, teasing out insecurities and conflicts from the routines. There are other ’70s and ’80s movies that touch upon this—the 1979 dramedy Starting Over appears on multiple Thanksgiving Movie lists seemingly just because of a particularly strong 10-minute Thanksgiving sequence around the middle of the film—but Hannah and Her Sisters takes it the furthest.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)

The one go-to selection that turns up on every single Thanksgiving Movies list and is also a genuine, bona fide classic, with the good sense to cover an area likely considered too unpleasant for other movies to touch: the absolute hell of plans going awry on one of the biggest travel days of the year. You know the story of uptight Neal (Steve Martin) reluctantly saddled with gregariously chatty Del (John Candy) on a detour-heavy, multiple-conveyance trip from New York to Chicago, and any number of farcical highlight-reel scenes may come to mind upon mere mention of the title (the shared hotel room bed, the rental-car tirade, the car fire). The very sentimentality that sometimes weakened writer-director John Hughes’ other films winds up pulling the film together. Hughes often turned to holidays in his later work, nearly remaking Planes, Trains, and Automobiles a few years later when he penned the similarly Thanksgiving-themed Dutch; the difference here is his skill at repeatedly pulling together two strangers with no formal obligation to each other, with tensions allowed to be both prickly and heartbreaking. Amidst all the slapstick, it’s his most grown-up film, with Martin and Candy showing impressive range even as they score big down-the-middle laughs.

The Ice Storm and The House of Yes (1997)

A full decade after the last great Thanksgiving movie, 1997 provided an unexpected feast in the form of two bracingly dark takes on the holiday. Many would probably pick Jodie Foster’s 1995 ensemble comedy Home for the Holidays to rep ’90s Thanksgiving; though that one has its charms, its high levels of bickering and yammering may feel redundant, depending on your family situation and/or tolerance levels. The Ice Storm, on the other hand, develops slowly and carefully, still processing social shifts of the 1970s at a velocity less exhilarating than Boogie Nights but ultimately maybe just as dazzling. Ang Lee, who was then just beginning a sporadic tour of American history, adapts a Rick Moody novel about two entwined suburban families and their Thanksgiving-weekend discontentment. Only one of them (a teenager played by a young Tobey Maguire) is returning from boarding school, but everyone feels some degree of alienation from what should be the comforts of (a relatively affluent and privileged) home. The Ice Storm, then, is admittedly not a comfort-food movie—save perhaps for its darkly comforting admission that adults can fumble through uncertain relationships just as readily as their kids.

House of Yes is technically even darker, but in a sleek, jet-black way that’s more stylish than devastating—though it’s plenty disturbing, too. A woman (Tori Spelling) accompanies her boyfriend (Josh Hamilton) back home for Thanksgiving with his unusual family, led (at least in strangeness) by his twin sister (Parker Posey), who dresses as Jackie Kennedy and cheerfully attempts to flex a sinister possessiveness over her brother, zinging out her stage-play-based dialogue with screwball zeal. Addams Family Values is another ’90s release often cited as a great Thanksgiving picture, entirely because of a brilliant subplot (technically set at a summer camp) wherein the Addams children eventually run roughshod over a plasticky, sunshine-y, racist travesty of a pilgrims-and-natives kiddie play. (This marvelous section is led by Christina Ricci, who also co-stars in The Ice Storm.) House of Yes doesn’t bring indigenous revenge into the proceedings, but it does function as a (somewhat) less cartoony and wholly holiday-set Addams riff, complete with a bizarre historical reenactment. After all, JFK’s assassination occurred just six days before Thanksgiving. Does House of Yes have a lot to say about the scars left on the mid-century American psyche by this tragedy? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s deeply satisfying that two different 1997 movies looked back on Thanksgiving past with so little nostalgia, especially now that the ’90s qualify for their own form of good-old-days-yet-not-really retrospective.

Tadpole (2002)

Upon its 2002 release, Tadpole was received by critics as a combo knockoff of Rushmore, The Graduate, Woody Allen, and Whit Stillman. (If this is the second time on this list that a movie is compared unfavorably to The Graduate, well, Thanksgiving is followed immediately by leftovers season.) That’s all fair enough; the story of a precocious/pretentious prep-school teenager (Aaron Stanford) returning home to New York City for the holiday and aspiring to seduce his stepmother (Sigourney Weaver), only to crash-land into an affair with her best friend (Bebe Neuwirth) instead, is both inferior to its major influences and a little discomfiting some 20 years later. It’s also a fast, funny, oddly likable indie misfit, using a kinda-ugly form of early digital video to bring some immediacy back to a New York setting often mistaken for romantic. With the fullness of time, it’s also easier to appreciate the good roles it offers Stanford, Neuwirth, and Weaver. Also: Between this and The Ice Storm, is Sigourney Weaver our finest avatar of bittersweet late-November desirability?

Turkey Bowl (2011) and Hollidaysburg (2014)

With the 21st-century advent of coming-of-age stories set in characters’ twenties rather than tween or teen years, and coming-home-from-war stories receding (or at least confined to grittier movies focused on psychological strife), it makes sense that filmmakers would start looking toward Thanksgiving rituals as possible catalysts for a softer form of quarterlife (or earlier) crises. Coming at the tail end of the 2000s mumblecore movement, Turkey Bowl (not to be confused with a 2019 comedy of virtually the same name; both are currently streaming on Tubi) could scarcely be slimmer, a 65-minute feature with no stars – though it does boast always-welcome Halt and Catch Fire actress Kerry Bishé. This micro-indie follows a small group of college-ish friends reuniting to play an annual touch football game, and that’s pretty much it. That form is also its subject: The fact that we’re watching them play in August, for the prize of a butterball turkey, presumably missing the actual holiday-season routine, is both a perfectly realistic admission of how far our social connections can drift, and a pretty likely excuse for a tiny production that probably had to shoot at a certain time and place, seasonality be damned. It’s so rare to get a movie that actually allows you to more or less experience a big annual ritual, rather than gesturing toward it, or turning it into a setting for something self-consciously bigger. Jealousies, rivalries, and general interpersonal dissatisfaction all flare up during Turkey Bowl, but it’s pointedly not allowed to reverberate past the end of the game. In its way, it’s a sports movie that’s as pure as an actual game.

Hollidaysburg has a weirder genesis: It was one of two features produced from the same screenplay by a cable filmmaking competition TV series called The Chair. The respective filmmakers were obviously able to shape the script to their respective sensibilities, because one director (the one who cut his teeth on YouTube) made Not Cool, which is, according to my extensive research, the single worst Thanksgiving movie ever made, while the other, A.M. Lukas, made Hollidaysburg, a sweetly low-key and well-observed movie about a time period that often falls through the cracks: a recent graduate’s freshman-year trip home for Thanksgiving. Most movies about teenagers around this age either end with them graduating high school and heading off into the sunset, or begin with them charging headlong into a college bacchanal. Hollidaysburg keeps college off-screen. Its dialogue, with a litany of references to unseen, full-named figures from the characters’ past, perfectly evokes high school as the recent past, getting less recent with every passing week. Lukas has a keen sense of how bumpy these back-and-forth transitions can be, often denying the kind of easy closure promised by, well, other movies, frankly. Given how many people celebrate Thanksgiving with some form of hometown reunion, this feels like crucial ground to cover. Neither Turkey Bowl nor Hollidaysburg are great movies, but they’re impressive in lots of small ways that tend to whoosh by their bigger-studio equivalents.

Mistress America (2015)

Despite its prominence on this list, New York City is actually a pretty lousy place for Thanksgiving. Yes, there’s the Macy’s Parade (better viewed from a home vantage) and a lack of big-box stores pushing capitalism riots (but also no hometown bars for impromptu reunions). There’s also a bunch of too-small apartment kitchens, terrible Thanksgiving menus at overpriced restaurants, and the potential lack of escape from your own insecurities. Before it even reaches the holiday at the tail end of the movie, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Mistress America understands the loneliness of a young person in New York, chronicling with rapid-fire hilarity the bumbling of Tracy (Lola Kirke), a Barnard freshman struggling to find her groove. And it understands with equal clarity the exhaustion of self-made bon vivants like Brooke (Greta Gerwig), who is circling 30 sporting a bunch of quirky bragging rights without many solid accomplishments. Naturally, one of her ambitions feels especially impossible, juxtaposed with the absences Thanksgiving drives home: To open a New York City restaurant that feels like home. The women are brought together by their parents’ impending marriage, set to take place over Thanksgiving break, and their Manhattan galivanting eventually turns into desperate commuter farce for a riotous yet oddly affecting last act. Thanksgiving isn’t just a November holiday about a month before Christmas; it’s the unofficial culmination of autumn before it gives way to winter, and Mistress America is about as autumnal as a quick-witted dialogue comedy—an even more quotable Baumbach/Gerwig joint than Barbie—can get. When the film finally arrives at that New York meal sit-down, it is, like the rest of the movie, perfectly observed, concise, and immensely satisfying. Without so much as a turkey glimpsed on screen, this might be the best Thanksgiving movie of the past quarter-century or more.

The Humans (2021)

Quietly released mid-pandemic in a few theaters and on Showtime by beloved indie studio A24, The Humans is the obligatory post-millennial-tension entry in the Thanksgiving canon. That fraught family dramas playing out over the dinner table—whether schticky or genuinely envelope-pushing—have become such an indie staple over the years (imagine the money saved on sets!) helps explain why there are so many more Thanksgiving movies from the past 30 years versus the many decades before. The Humans is yet another New York-set drama (sorry! It’s just such an easy shorthand for holiday struggle), gathering family members played an eclectic cast (Richard Jenkins, stage vet Jayne Houdyshell, Amy Schumer, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun) at a creaky downtown apartment where various tensions compete with the eerie, ghostly sounds that surround them. The more acclaimed Thanksgiving drama of the A24 era, with similarly horror-movie-style effects contributing to a haunted feel, is Krisha, and it’s a worthy exercise in well-wrought discomfort, more overtly cinematic than this stage adaptation. But for my money, The Humans digs deeper into its characters, benefiting from writer-director Stephen Karam’s thoughtfully unsparing writing. Like a lot of the titles on this list, it’s not exactly a heartwarmer – and that quality may make you feel a little bit less alone, no matter how you’re spending the holiday.

Originally Appeared on GQ