Five Thanksgiving Movies to Love

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

If you’ve experienced that disaster of a trip home for the holidays—the car breaks down, a blizzard adds hours to your drive time, you lost your cell phone and can't get a hold of your ride back to Michigan—Planes, Trains and Automobiles will be a riot—it is either way, actually. Steve Martin plays an executive and family man trying to get from New York City to Chicago for Thanksgiving and John Candy is a shower curtain ring salesman who joins Martin in a hilariously tumultuous and seemingly hopeless journey home via doomed modes of transportation.

The Scent of a Woman (1992)

The Thanksgiving dinner scene in this classic Al Pacino film depicts a setting far from desirable as a drunk Frank Slade is his usual self and his nephew taunts and ridicules him about the accident that caused his blindness. No family is perfect. The Scent of a Woman reminds us of that.

Son in Law (1993)

Going home for Thanksgiving after the first semester of college is probably a shock to most, including Rebecca Warner, a farm-grown sweetheart who takes her new friend Crawl (Pauly Shore) home for the holiday. At first, no one knows what to think of the weird, long-haired, bandana-wearing dude who adds ‘age’ to every word, but they come to love him as he shows the boring farm town folk how to let loose. 

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973)

The gang puts Charlie Brown on food duty and Snoopy and Woodstock scramble to put together dishes like buttered toast and popcorn, saving the turkey and pie for themselves. Sitting around their ping-pong table for the feast, the meaning of Thanksgiving is apparent, thanks to Linus. It's fun, sentimental, kind of educational and kid-friendly.

Gumpy Old Men (1993)

Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau have fought incessantly over nothing for years and finally have something to fight for when a lovely redhead moves on the block. The two old goons go at it the same way they did at 11, but have to clean up their act if they want to win over the woman. The slew of cheap shots ("Why don't you do yourself a favor and pull your lip over your head and swallow!" and "Eat my shorts") are hilarious—perfect for a post-feast pre-food coma.