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10 Best Thanksgiving Movies to Watch with Family

2016 Thanksgiving is literally right around the corner. In less than 2 weeks many of us will be cooking that massive meal to host for the family. And get into the spirit of the holiday by watching a fun Thanksgiving movie paired with a delicious dish is undoubtedly a wonderful idea. This article provides 10 best Thanksgiving movies that definitely worth your time to share with your family.

We've selected the top 10 movies that we think are the best turkey-day movies:

The Ice Storm (1997)

It's the weekend after Thanksgiving 1973 in tiny New Canaan, Connecticut, and more than just an ice storm's a-brewing. Benjamin Hood (Kevin Kline) reels from drink to drink when he's not water- bedding his next-door-neighbor (a brilliantly brittle Sigourney Weaver). His wife (Joan Allen) immerses herself in self-help books but is quickly losing her grip over her husband's lies.
Their son (Tobey Maguire), home for the holidays, moons over a Noxzema-fresh cutie from his prep school. Meanwhile, their darling pubescent daughter gropes the neighborhood boys and plunders liquor cabinets in a desperate attempt to cope. When the wind starts to whistle the night of a spouse-swapping key party, tragedy can't be far behind.

Ang Lee triumphs in re-creating the awkward suburban angst of the early '70s, delving deeper than just dressing the film in gargantuan collars, polyester slacks suits and rainbow toe-socks (though these touches nail the look of the era). The performances are top-notch, the visuals crystalline. One of the year's stand-out releases, The Ice Storm exposes the characters' appropriately slippery hold on the times and each other.

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What's Cooking (2000)

Set in the diverse Fairfax district of Los Angeles, this underrated film follows four families of different ethnic backgrounds as they celebrate Thanksgiving while dealing with different kinds of conflict. Herb and Ruth Seelig cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that their daughter, Rachel, is gay, even when she brings her lover, Carla, home for the holiday. Ron and Audrey Williams go to great lengths to keep their family's secret from Ron's visiting mother. Elizabeth Avila has to host Thanksgiving for her family and deal with her son inviting her estranged, womanizing husband to dinner. Finally, the Nguyen's biggest fears come true when they find condoms in their daughter's jacket and a gun in their son's room.

Gurinder Chadha, the film's director, went on to direct the popular Bend It Like Beckham just two years later. Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, and Alfre Woodard all give strong performances in What's Cooking as family matriarchs. Multiple Emmy winners Kyra Sedgwick and Julianna Margulies are memorable as Rachel and Carla, the lesbian couple dealing with a family's discomfort while trying to be true to who they are.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

Steve Martin's marketing executive just wants to get home to New York for Thanksgiving in John Hughes' 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but fate constantly stymies those plans- well, fate and John Candy's shower-ring salesman, a chipper and clumsy clown who becomes his unlikely traveling partner during this rollicking three-day odyssey. The pillow scene remains an all-time classic gag.

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Dutch (1991)

Ed O'Neill's great unsung big-screen performance is in this 1991 comedy, which (like Planes, Trains and Automobiles) involves a road-trip home for Thanksgiving by two combative men. In this case, they're O'Neill's boorish slob and Ethan Embry's snobby prep-school kid- the son of O'Neill's girlfriend (JoBeth Williams)- who, through a series of misadventures, forge a lasting friendship.

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Home for the Holidays (1995)

Jodie Foster's finest directorial effort remains this 1995 comedy about the Thanksgiving get-together of Holly Hunter's thoroughly dysfunctional clan, which includes her mother (Anne Bancroft) and father (Charles Durning), and her brother (Robert Downey Jr.), and his friend (Dylan McDermott). What ensues is the gold-standard for family-gathering holiday films, full of absurdity, pathos, and, ultimately, a rousing sense of the ups and downs of dealing with relatives.

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Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Opening and closing with scenes of its characters at Thanksgiving dinner, Woody Allen's 1986 comedic drama- which won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor and Actress statuettes for Michael Caine and Diane Wiest, respectively- tells a raft of interconnected stories, all in some way related to Mia Farrow's Hannah and her two siblings. Equal parts hilarious and touching, it remains one of the writer-director's crowning achievements.

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Scent of a Woman (1992)

Over the course of a Thanksgiving weekend, Chris O'Donnell's prep school student comes of age while caring for a blind retired army lieutenant (Al Pacino) in Martin Brest's acclaimed Scent of a Woman, which finally earned Pacino his first-ever Academy Award (for Best Actor). Amidst all of its star's blustery hoo-ahing, it's a surprisingly tender tale of an unlikely friendship between two strangers.

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Grumpy Old Men (1993)

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are two bitter lifelong rivals who engage in ludicrous warfare over the affections of their new Wabasha, Minnesota neighborhood resident (Ann-Margret). That conflict includes an amusing Thanksgiving dinner, in which the two do their best to act like feuding immature children.

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The New World (2005)

No, it doesn't feature a storybook pilgrims-and-Native Americans feast. Nonetheless, Terrence Malick's 2005 drama- about the founding of Virginia's Jamestown settlement, and the mythical romance that blossoms between British Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Native American Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher)- is the lyrical, haunting story of America's birth, and thus the ideal masterpiece to experience on Thanksgiving.

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Thanksgiving (2007)

Horror director Eli Roth paid tribute to '70s and '80s slasher classics with this fake trailer forThanksgiving, which was featured as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez'sGrindhouse. There's no actual feature film-yet-but Roth's phony promo is the hilarious horror masterpiece that the holiday never received, but (clearly) deserves.

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Extension: How to Watch Thanksgiving Movies Smoothly

Actually, it's easy for you to download some Thanksgiving movies online in HD quality. If you want to watch these Thanksgiving movies on your computer or stream movies to handy- finger-touch screen's devices like iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Amazon Kindle Fire, Google Nexus, Surface etc, here comes a solution for you- Brorsoft Video Converter. It enables you to convert Thanksgiving video clips in any format like MKV, AVI, WMV, MOV, etc to a decent format for enjoying on your iPad Ari, iPad Mini, Galaxy Tab and other devices to anytime anywhere. For Mac users, please get Video Converter for Mac.

download_windows.gif download_mac.gif (Note: Click here for OS X 10.5)

P.S. For those who wanna convert Thanksgiving HD video files and liberate Thanksgiving movies from Blu-ray or DVD disc, you'd better get the all-in-one tool Blu-ray Video Converter Ultimate to achieve the goal effortlessly. For Mac users, please get iMedia Converter for Mac, which enables you to convert and watch the best Thanksgiving movies anytime anywhere on your portable device.

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