Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

SnoopyStyle April Burns (Katie Holmes) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) are cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her family in her rundown NYC apartment. She discovers their stove doesn't work and she tries desperately to find a working stove. April's mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson) is sick. Her sister Beth (Alison Pill) is annoyingly smothering and doesn't want Thanksgiving at April's. Her brother Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) got her mother weed. Her father Jim (Oliver Platt) tries hard to keep everybody happy. And Grandma Dottie (Alice Drummond) is losing her memories. April finds help from her neighbors Evette (Lillias White), Eugene (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and weird Wayne (Sean Hayes).This is a small indie from Peter Hedges. The production is strictly low budget hand-held camera work. Katie Holmes isn't stretching too far and does a good job. The family is led by the great Patricia Clarkson. There is a bit of low simmering charm about this. Every once in awhile, it lands a hilarious punch. It doesn't always hit solidly, but it usually leaves you smiling.

Roberta Parry I don't live in America, so Thanksgiving is a bit lost on me, but I thought this movie was very enjoyable, with a totally justified "happy ending." However, I would never, ever label it a comedy, as I would expect all of the more light-hearted dramas to contain some humour. There were places where I expected a joke to be made, or to be made more of, and so when there wasn't one, that scene ended on an anticlimax. I thought the soundtrack was absolutely perfect; I looked it up after watching the film yesterday, and almost every song on the soundtrack album spoke to me, and connected with me far more than the film itself (not a criticism of the film, I just adore the soundtrack that much) Also, the ending was a tad predictable; just from reading the back cover of the DVD I assumed that she would demonstrate her worth through all the people in her block who considered her a friend, and while that wasn't the case, it was close enough to make me feel slightly cheated.

MeloDee The premise of the movie is a simple one and basically summarizes the whole movie, "A wayward daughter invites her dying mother and the rest of her estranged family to her apartment for Thanksgiving dinner." The movie starts us off on that Thanksgiving morning. First, we are introduced to April, and her boyfriend Bobby who are living together in a shanty apartment in New York, and then to April's mother, father, and brothers and sisters in another location, who are preparing to make the trip to visit her. We aren't provided with any back story, except what we gather about the past from conversations that April's mother has with the rest of the family during their voyage.Honestly, I was finding myself slightly bored during the beginning of the movie. The film, although over an hour, manages to span over just one day, lending it a slow feel. The cinematography was somewhat unimpressive. The soundtrack is sparse, with most scenes not having any music at all, and the music that is present is humming just outside the viewer's awareness most of the time rather than being the main focus in any one scene. I found myself easily able to make prejudgments about each of the main characters based on their limited dialogues and their reactions to things going on around them. I stereotyped Beth as the movie's prim and proper "good younger daughter". She gave unsolicited advice with surprising frequency, and always seemed to try to distinguish herself as being the opposite of the "wild child" elder sister that she obviously secretly envied, if not admired. Timmy played an easygoing middle-child, cleverly juggling his role of responsibility as the one only other "man of the house" with the conflicting role of unimportance being in the middle tends to lend to a person. Bobby was the soft-hearted but firm father. You could almost feel his tension when you looked at him, empathize with his struggles to hold his family together, knowing that he would someday have to do it all alone.Finally, we come to April's mother, Joy. Whether Joy is an ironic name for her or not, I will leave for you viewers to decide. She comes across as jaded and sarcastic, with a sly sense of humor and a stubborn streak. Most of all though, she seems tired, the toll from her illness clear on her; the toll from her strained relationship with April, clearer still.Then of course, there's April herself. She's fierce, independent, and loyal. It isn't hard to see why she could've gotten into trouble in the past, but it also isn't difficult to see how she probably got out of it. This movie definitely has its funny moments, mostly stemming from the encounters with the characters that Apirl meets as she struggles to pull together her Thanksgiving dinner. Her family also has some adventures during their trip, starting (almost) with picking up April's partially senile grandmother from the nursing home. Despite its simplicity- or maybe because of it- this film will tug at your heartstrings in a way that you don't expect. At least, it certainly did mine, partially because I could personally identify with having a strained relationship with my own mother, even if it was just for a time. I found myself close to tears during some moments, which is rare.I think the message of the movie is, that love has power, that family is still family even when some of you don't fit in, some of you don't like each other too much, and some of you try too hard to be perfect, ultimately failing. Most fail, however, when they don't try at all. It all sounds trite and very cliché, but this film somehow delivers itself in a way that makes the message both memorable and believable. The cast had to carry so much and each member carried his/her share with significant grace.Happy Thanksgiving to everybody- hopefully this movie will help you to remember what the season is supposed to be about.

mmagliaro If ever there was a movie about acceptance, dysfunctional families, and putting people and feelings first, this is it. Katie Holmes is FABULOUS as a daughter who lives in somewhat of a hovel of an apartment in the city. Her family is en route by car to spend Thanksgiving at her apartment. Initially, it appears that they (her mom, dad, brother, etc) are the white-bread average stable American family, and April is the one who just can't get her life together. The movie flips back and forth between April and her family. We see scenes of her trying to learn to cook, overcome a broken stove, sociopathic building neighbors, poverty, and a host of other ills to pull off Thanksgiving dinner. These are interspersed with scenes of the family on their long car drive en route to April's apartment. The film does a masterful job of making a whole story just out of revealing and exploring the personalities of April and her family. We gradually come to understand that April is a perfectly charming, sincere young woman who loves people and tries her best. It is her family who are the losers who really have no life. They reveal themselves as, in one way or another, lazy, unaffectionate, preoccupied with getting high, self-loathing, judgmental, prejudiced, hateful people.It's hard to believe that it's Katie Holmes, but it is. She was TERRIFIC in this.