FREE ON CINEGEEK.De Pieces Of April 

Here comes a Thanksgiving movie! It's about loving each other in the family and getting together again. In spite of everything. Pieces Of April was the role model for a whole indie direction that is about dysfunctional families. They argue, but in the end they reconcile - somehow. In the end it goes well for everyone. Only not for the turkey. - Two and a half parallel stories are told. The first is about how the Burns family travels from the suburbs to New York. At Thanksgiving they want to visit their daughter April. She lives as a punk in N.Y. Story two is about how April, who has never cooked anything in her life, tries to do just that. Story Three sends her boyfriend on an almost hopeless mission. Katie Holms plays the tattooed April, the shame of her family. Derek Luke gives her boyfriend - one of a kind with whom nothing ever works. The parents are Jim Burns (Oliver Platt) and Joy (Patricia Clarkson), but the film focuses entirely on the mother and daughter relationship. Joy suffers from breast cancer and in all probability this will be her last Thanksgiving. But her own mortality is a nice opportunity for Joy to spread her own humor. After the punk rock rebellion, April's apartment looks like a dump, but her boyfriend convinces her that it's enough for Thanksgiving Dinner. It's just stupid that April's oven is broken, which leads to a mission through the broken neighborhood. Whose stove still works? A nice and funny odyssey, which reminds us that in America everyone is an immigrant (whether Chinese or "American"). But then the movie ends abruptly, just as if the money had run out. Maybe it was like that? on wikipedia you can read that Pieces Of April only cost 300.000 Dollars and Holmes renounced her fee. The pictures also seem as if the cameraman didn't have time. Apart from that, however, it became a lively and likeable comedy that even conveys human insights! I think Pieces Of April was a matter close to the heart of director Peter Hedges. He (who also wrote the script) wrote something about his liver. Beautiful!