Movies to Watch When You Go Home for Thanksgiving: Six Films for the Night You're Back in Your Childhood Bedroom

It's Wednesday night, a little after eleven, and you're lying in a twin bed you outgrew in ninth grade. The glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck to the ceiling at twelve still give off a faint green, a little weaker every year. Downstairs the dishwasher hums, and the table is already set for tomorrow, because your mother always sets it the night before. You've been home six hours. You love everyone in this house, and you've been asked about your job twice, your love life once and whether you're eating enough three times.

Going home for Thanksgiving does something strange to grown adults: it hands you back the person you were at fifteen and asks you to be both people at once. Filmmakers keep going home too, and four of the six movies below grew out of their directors' own lives: a disastrous trip home, two dying mothers, a grandmother who was never told. Thanksgiving falls on November 26 this year, so here is a lineup for the long weekend, ordered like the holiday itself. It ends gently, with a film for everyone who couldn't make it home at all.

1. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

Two days before Thanksgiving, Neal Page (Steve Martin), a buttoned-up Chicago ad man, just wants to fly home from New York. Instead he gets Del Griffith (John Candy), a chatty shower-curtain-ring salesman, as his seatmate, then his roommate in a Wichita motel, then his co-driver in a rental car that is having a worse week than they are. John Hughes wrote and directed 93 minutes of one man's patience being sanded down to the wood.

It's the right opener because it's about the part of the holiday that happens before the holiday. Hughes had lived it. Den of Geek's David Crow recounts that during his copywriting days Hughes meant to spend a single afternoon in New York, then spent five days trying to get back to Chicago because of the weather, landing as far off course as Phoenix and passing most of the holiday with a salesman who'd seen it all. Knowing that, watch Neal's meltdown at the car-rental counter again: it plays like a writer getting even, years later, with the Thanksgiving that went sideways on him.

Spoiler warning: the next paragraph discusses the ending.

The first assembly ran close to four hours, and the scripted ending didn't work, so Hughes and his editor rebuilt it in the summer, long after the Chicago snow had melted. Crow writes that the look on Martin's face in the final train scene, where Neal quietly puts Del's story together, came from footage Hughes had his cinematographer shoot in secret earlier, while Martin stood between setups running his lines.

Look for: Neal on the train, framed so tight you can't tell it was never shot on a Chicago train. It plays as a man changing his mind about someone. It was a man memorizing dialogue.

2. Home for the Holidays (1995)

Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) loses her job at a Chicago art museum, kisses her boss on the way out, and flies to Baltimore for Thanksgiving with a head cold. At the airport, her father (Charles Durning) is filming her arrival on a home video camera, and her mother (Anne Bancroft) has brought a spare parka in case Claudia lost hers. She did. Jodie Foster directed, from a W.D. Richter script, and Robert Downey Jr. turns up as Tommy like a lit sparkler someone tossed into the living room.

This is the movie for the first night back, when everyone slides into their old roles within the hour. Roger Ebert's 1995 review caught the joke and the ache of it: none of these people act as if anything is happening to them for the first time. Even the turkey that lands in a sister's lap feels like a rerun. The parents' house, which Ebert described as crammed with the kind of tiny knickknacks sold in cheap mail-order catalogs, does half the acting.

Look for: Hunter's hands at the dinner table. The A.V. Club's Danny King singled out the way she fiddles with a napkin while Downey tells the whole family about her string of disasters. Watch her shrink back to sixteen without a word.

3. Pieces of April (2003)

April Burns (Katie Holmes), the family's black sheep, has invited her suburban relatives to her tiny Lower East Side apartment for Thanksgiving dinner. Her mother, Joy (Patricia Clarkson), is terminally ill with cancer, and this may be her last Thanksgiving. Then, on the morning of, April's oven dies, and she has to go door to door through her building looking for a neighbor who'll let her borrow theirs. Meanwhile, the family drives in, stalling, bickering and at one point burying a piece of roadkill.

Put it on for the year you're the one cooking, or the year you're trying to fix something with a single meal. Writer-director Peter Hedges told IndieWire that his budget fell apart when all three backers pulled out; the low-budget digital company InDigEnt said yes within 24 hours, and he was shooting two weeks later, in 15 days total. He called it "a human comedy about running out of time," made at the same speed its characters were living.

It's also a son's tribute. Hedges told IndieWire his own mother used to call during her illness and ask, "How's our movie coming along?" He had no words at her funeral, he said, and making this film was how he finally got to say "a proper goodbye."

Look for: the parade of apartment doors. Each neighbor April knocks on gets a few seconds to be strange, kind or both, and a building full of strangers slowly starts to care how her turkey turns out.

4. The Farewell (2019)

Billi (Awkwafina), a struggling writer in New York, learns that her grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), has been diagnosed with terminal cancer back in Changchun, China. The family has decided not to tell her. Instead they stage a wedding for Billi's cousin so everyone can fly in. "Wedding is an excuse, so everyone can go see her," Billi's father (Tzi Ma) says. If you've ever flown home and quietly counted how many more holidays you'll get with someone, that line lands right under the ribs.

Lulu Wang wrote and directed it from life. She told Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air that in 2013 her own grandmother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and given three months, that the family kept it from her, and that Wang "turned out to be a surprisingly good liar." The lie had to survive the shoot: Wang told TheWrap that the crew's gift T-shirts said Nai Nai in Chinese characters, a block from her grandmother's house, so she confiscated every one. The film's Chinese title, Wang told NPR, is Don't Tell Her.

This is the middle of the weekend, when the house is fullest: a big round table, relatives asking about life in America, a family performing happiness so hard it hurts.

Look for: the wedding banquet, where grown men in the family break down at different moments and still get through the evening without tipping off Nai Nai. Then keep an eye on Little Nai Nai, the grandmother's sister. She's played by Wang's real great-aunt, who, Wang told TheWrap, had to take a month off from looking after the real Nai Nai to be in the movie.

5. Still Walking (2008)

Once a year, the Yokoyama family gathers at the parents' house for the anniversary of the eldest son's death. He drowned years ago saving a boy. Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), the younger son, comes home reluctantly with his new wife, Yukari (Yui Natsukawa), a widow, and her young son. His mother, Toshiko (Kirin Kiki), cooks all day and says devastating things with a pleasant face.

Hirokazu Kore-eda built it out of regret. He told Filmmaker Magazine that he didn't go home in time when his mother fell ill and that he and his older sister kept notes on their conversations, five notebooks over her last two years, full of memories of the old house and "the tempura we used to eat." Those notebooks became the screenplay.

Kore-eda also told Filmmaker that in his family, and most families he knows, people don't say what they feel to the person they feel it about; they go and say it to someone else. Yukari has to smile from morning to night, so he gave her one scene alone in a bedroom, where her husband walks in and she finally says what she thinks. If you've ever hidden in your old room for ten minutes on a holiday, you'll know that scene before it starts.

Look for: the moment an old record goes on: "Blue Light Yokohama," which Kore-eda told Filmmaker was a favorite of his own mother's; the film's Japanese title comes from its lyrics. Watch who in the room knows why Toshiko loves it.

6. The Holdovers (2023)

It's December 1970 at Barton Academy, a New England boarding school. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a classics teacher whom students and colleagues equally dread, gets stuck minding the boys who have nowhere to go over winter break. Soon he's down to one: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), whose holiday plans fell through at the last minute. The third person on the empty campus is the head cook, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), facing her first holiday since her son was killed in Vietnam. Alexander Payne directed.

This one is for the people who didn't go home this year, by choice or by bad luck, or who don't have a home that feels like one. Payne told WBUR he shot it entirely in Massachusetts, with Deerfield Academy and other schools standing in for Barton, and that the '70s were easy to find "because change comes slowly to New England." Sessa, in his screen debut, was pulled straight from Deerfield's student body, and you can see a real teenager's awkwardness in every slouch. Even the weather pitched in: effects supervisor Adam Bellao told WBUR that local schools and businesses saved their snow for the crew to haul away.

Look for: the trip into Boston, where the three of them come closest to being a family for an afternoon. Bellao told WBUR the snow on Boston Common is real.

When the House Goes Quiet

What these six films understand is that going home is time travel without a return ticket to the home you remember. Ryota keeps arriving one visit too late. Billi learns that her family's lie is also a way of carrying grief so Nai Nai doesn't have to. Neal figures out, on a cold train, that the man who drove him crazy for three days has nowhere to be on Thursday. None of these movies promises that a holiday will fix your family. They say something smaller and more useful: showing up counts, even with a cold, even grumpy, even with an oven that won't light.

It's past midnight now, and the stars on the ceiling have nearly faded out; downstairs the table is waiting under the dark. Next time you watch Still Walking, look at the eldest son's grave when the family visits it. Someone has already left flowers there, and Kore-eda told Filmmaker that you never find out who left them. If this also happens to be your first holiday since a breakup, our list for that week is waiting too. More moods are coming.