The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This movie had superb acting talent across about 2.5 generations of actors- and all of this talent is just wasted.The writing is poor, disjointed and does not tell either a good overall story or good individual stories. Slow, boring, bad. A real waste of talent.I do not know what the budget was but it had to be small. Still with Danner & company the results should have been much better. The viewer is dragged through a bunch off scenes that do not connect with each other at all. Don't waste your time.

A heavily dysfunctional family gets together for Thanksgiving. We see their interactions and their inability to connect with each other.Very quiet and somber with touches of humor. This is a slow, moody film. Some people will love this, others will hate it. I personally wasn't too thrilled (I found it much too slow and quite a few people left the screening I attended) but I can see why some people like this. It has a great cast and is very well-acted and written. The direction seems a little off though. So, if you're into a quiet, moody study of a family--this is for you. Also it is interesting to watch now for the cast--some of them were unknown when this came out and have gone on to bigger and better things. There are two great sequences:The children's' reactions when their parents start to tell them about their sex life and, at one point, one woman sees a huge spider who is killed by her boyfriend. She says, "That was a huge spider! It would have whomped Charlotte's ass!" That line had me giggling for 10 minutes and has never left me--and I saw the film back in 1997!

I turned this off after the first five minutes when I first saw it on TV. After seeing it again years later I enjoyed it a lot more than I though I would. It's just a simple story of a fairly dysfunctional family getting together for the holidays.I liked the beautiful, sparsely populated Maine setting. James LeGros' off the wall character was the best thing about the film. I would have liked to have seen more of him. And hallelujah, one of my all time favorite actors, Roy Schneider is back in A-list action after being stuck in B-movie hell for so damn long. Noah Wyle and redheaded vixen Julianne Moore dish out good performances as well.It's not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. Just a surprisingly good one. It could have been a bit longer, maybe the screenplay punched up and it would qualify as great. But kudos all around nonetheless to the cast and filmmakers, they still did themselves proud, baby. This movie is a hidden gem. It wasn't widely seen as it should have been.

After all the attention this film received at Sundance, the eventual release was disappointing. The writing was unfocused. There were too many characters to portray effectively. Perhaps a small family would have served the story better. The editing was also sloppy, although that may be due to the poor writing. Scenes cut away at their apex, leaving no resolution to them and when threads picked up again, it was hardly from where they left off. Some of the emotional arcs jumped from one transition to another without explanation. Performances save the day, but not enough to recommend or make this one a keeper.