The 21 Best Thanksgiving Movies of All Time

“Thanksgiving movie” isn’t exactly a genre, or… is it? While it doesn’t have the lore of its Christmas cousins, this sub-subgenre contains a surprising number of films that either focus on Thanksgiving or address it in passing. And in one way or another, they address the universal themes that make us love/hate the holiday: a lot of delicious food, gratefulness, menace, families that love each other or want to love each other but can’t. And carving mishaps, naturally.

Still, like the holiday itself (neither religious nor political, not really indebted to any single culture except the space the United States inhabits, and open to endless interpretations), Thanksgiving movies are hard to pin down. There are the traditional gather-around-the-stuffing affairs like the classic A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but also diversion into multiethnic experiences as in What’s Cooking? The inevitable awkwardness is the center of Home for the Holidays and Pieces of April. Sweet November, meanwhile, is enough to make anyone to yearn for an arousing end of month.

So these Thanksgiving movies are a hodgepodge, and unapologetically so. Though for better or worse, they may make you grateful for a slightly quieter time with sweet potato mash and cranberry sauce. Here are the 21 best Thanksgiving movies of all time:

Because, well, no one comforts us during the holidays quite like Peanuts, and this short special is almost as magical as the Christmas one. While it’s been a broadcast mainstay in past years, it’ll be available free streaming on Apple TV+ for a period.

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Controversial opinion: The New World is the best Thanksgiving movie. The origins of Thanksgiving aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy, and Terrence Malick’s (Days of Heaven, Tree of Life) underappreciated 2005 masterpiece wrestles with the costs of the settling of Jamestown, Virginia, on all sides (while still being gorgeous to look at, this being Malick). Even the deeply romantic moments between John Smith and Pocahantas are rooted in a real sense of place, and backgrounded by historical peril. Just let everyone know this isn’t exactly a feel-good Turkey Day experience.

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True to its title, The Ice Storm couldn’t really be icier. One of Ang Lee’s best movies, it transports us to the mind of young, moody Elijah Wood as Paul Hood and then from there to the tragic and sometimes kinky ‘70s messiness of two suburban families set over a Thanksgiving weekend. There’s a key party and Sigourney Weaver, so the film kind of sells itself.

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John Hughes proved he had chops outside the teen comedy genre, and then some. John Candy and Steve Martin are pitch-perfect awkward buds traveling to get the latter back to his family for Thanksgiving. Hughes laces their natural comedic gifts with an underlying desperation that everyone can recognize.

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Holly Hunter is her usual irresistibly charming self in the Jodie Foster-directed Home for the Holidays, as a put-upon and fired mom who’s ditched for Thanksgiving by her own daughter and must travel to deal with the affronts of her Chicago family instead. There’s nothing totally surprising here, but the cast is reason enough to stick around. No one lands jokes like Hunter, Robert Downey Jr. (!), Anne Bancroft, and Charles Durning. (Oh, there’s also Claire Danes as said daughter who informs her mom she will be promptly sleeping with her boyfriend, though not in a car.)

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Ike Barinholtz and Tiffany Haddish are two very, very funny comedians who unsurprisingly deliver on their gifts in this darker take on Thanksgiving, in which the two actors as a couple must legally swear their allegiance to the United States government in a draconian near-future.

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This small movie is more fierce than most Thanksgiving movies, shooting real family members in order to confront the pain that afflicts them over the course of the holiday. The sometimes abrasive techniques might be a bit too much for some, but there’s artistry here.

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Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau more or less invented the “aren’t those old guys cute?” comedy genre with Grumpy Old Men. The two are delightfully ornery frenemies vying for the courtship of a woman with, among other things, a Thanksgiving dinner. And yes, it’s cute.

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Al Pacino’s “hoo-ah” meme was born with his Academy Award-winning performance in Scent of a Woman, which is reason enough to watch. But it’s also a tender portrayal of a bond between a prep school student and Pacino’s blind yet suave alcoholic bent on death. So you know, normal family stuff.

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Get ready for Black Friday early with this Kevin James-starring comedy, in which a mall cop feebly faces the most disastrous consequences of the big shopping day. It came and went in theaters, but it’s become a rightful cult hit.

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This underseen 2000 comedy-drama embraces the everyone-under-the-tent spirit of Thanksgiving that is the holiday’s true source of joy. Starring Kyra Sedgwick, Dennis Haysbert, Julianna Margulies, Joan Chen, and Alfre Woodard among others, it weaves its way through the stories of four ethnically diverse families who have their own traditions, the universal one being bickering complemented by love.

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Sweet November stars the extremely sexy (as if it needed to be said) Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, who on an apparent lark live together for the whole month of November. It hits the familiar steps of a glossy early-2000s rom-com, but Reeves and Theron convince us it’s something precious, probably because they’re lovely and talented and should be in everything.

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Thanksgiving has its own meaning for immigrants in the United States that can be hard to define, but Barry Levinson’s (Rain Man) Avalon tracks rifts over generations of immigrants in a touching way. It also includes the simple yet perfect Thanksgiving line “You cut the turkey without me?”

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If you can get past Woody Allen’s current ugly reputation, this flick is of his better dives into his movies’ usual neuroses, following the various funny-repellant dysfunctions of an extended family over two years and bookended by Thanksgiving dinners.

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Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had a special chemistry on the screen that’s impossible to replicate. In the vaguely Thanksgiving-related You’ve Got Mail, writer-director Nora Ephron drinks them in while giving them the pitter-patter wit that made her a legend in her own right.

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It’s time for Katie Holmes to get due for her late ‘90s and early-2000s movie acting work, which is admittedly very limited. The winners are Go and this low-budget effort about a tattooed New York City girl (Holmes) whose family is visiting her rickety apartment for Thanksgiving in spite of her wayward attitude while mom (a wonderful Patricia Clarkson) deals with a cancer diagnosis. It stumbles on some indie-movie cliches of the era, it’s also funny and heartfelt, and Holmes has weirdly never been more convincing.

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Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz capturing an epic performance by the Band (with guests you may know like, uh, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Mavis Staples—it keeps going) is arguably the greatest concert documentary ever. It also captures a fascinatingly unique moment in time, for music and a wider culture that in 1976 was already slipping away. Oh, and it was filmed on Thanksgiving Day.

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Paul Shore gets crap for his (now dated) shtick but he had longevity in the ‘90s for a reason: It worked. The farm girl-meets-California hippie setup of Son in Law, sure, is contrived, but it also has the pleasantly zonked-out humor of Shore and Carla Gugino.

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No one would really call Addams Family Values a Thanksgiving movie, but it does have a pivotal and hilarious Thanksgiving scene (little Christina Ricci’s Wednesday as Pocahontas) and it’s a purely fun ‘90s throwback.

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It’s hard to call Thankskilling a good film, but it’s an amusing group watch if you’re (safely) celebrating Thanksgiving with friends or family who are into chatting over scary movies that aren’t remotely scary but do elicit chuckles. This one stars a talking murderous bird. Crack open the Wild Turkey and take in all its low-rent glory.

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This ink-black comedy about awkward Thanksgiving chatter is distinctive for two reasons: sharp dialogue, and the genuinely otherworldly bizarreness that only Parker Posey can bring to a role.

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