Ross Bonaime, Staff Writer
As the holiday season begins, many will be spending time with their friends and families this Thanksgiving. With families gathering together this week, here are the top 10 movies about families.
10. The Bicycle Thief
This classic Italian film centers around a poor family and the father who finally gets a job, which requires him to ride around on a bike.
After selling the family’s bed sheets to purchase the bicycle, the bike gets stolen the day it was purchased, leaving him and his son to try and find the criminal.
This beautiful story shows their relationship as the father tries to teach his son about right and wrong while also trying to keep his family afloat.
9. Juno
Sometimes, new families start a little earlier than planned. That’s what happens to the MacGuff family when their teenage daughter Juno becomes pregnant.
Ellen Page, as the title character plays the naiveté of a 16-year-old perfectly, but it is her father and step-mother, played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, respectively, that really show this film’s heart and a parent’s ability to support their children through anything.
8. The Incredibles
The Parr family in Pixar’s action film shows that even with super powers, families take work. Together, the family/superhero team tries to take down super villain Syndrome.
Yet while trying to do that, they find that each member of their family is an integral part of who they are as a group.
7. Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson’s twisting and perplexing story of people living in L.A. in a 24-hour period, not only connects them by a freak occurrence near the film’s end, but all of the characters are examples of the negative effects family can have on you. The poor parental figures have a way of leaving their mark, especially with Tom Cruise’s Frank T.J. Mackey character, in one of his best roles in a great career.
6. Little Miss Sunshine
It may take a beauty pageant, a bus that won’t run, an attempted suicide, a family member realizing that he is color-blind, a father being unsuccessful and a heroin-addicted grandfather to die, all in the span of a two days, for the Hoover family to come together. But by the time they dance on stage to “Super Freak,” you know that they are a family that has truly learned to love each other.
5. The Royal Tenenbaums
This wonderfully exquisite tale of an estranged father trying to reconnect his family before his death creates director Wes Anderson’s greatest film. This twisted and eccentric family becoming less self-serving and more of a larger group shows how a diverse group of oddballs can become a great family.
4. Father of the Bride (1950)
Spencer Tracy plays the concerned father, Stanley T. Banks, in this bittersweet love story about a father and daughter. Banks must deal with the change of his daughter becoming a bride, and the bills that come along with it.
Even though Banks is forced to work through all the pains that come along with planning a wedding, he realizes that in the end it was all worth it just to make his daughter happy.
3. Raising Arizona
In this Coen brothers comedy classic, Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter are a married couple who can’t have children and take the next logical step to start their family – steal a baby.
The dedication that Cage and Hunter show to this child that they have kidnapped and their great desire for a little one is as heartwarming as it is unusual.
2. Boogie Nights
Sure this movie is about a prospective porn star, played by Mark Wahlberg, trying to rise in the ranks of the business, but strip away the layers of this film and you’ll find a story about a man just trying to create his own family.
Boogie Nights, also directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, shows that even if your family sucks, you can always make a new one.
1. The Godfather
The Corleone family is arguably the most famous film family of all time, and rightfully so.
This iconic tale of a mafia family undergoing great change has some of the greatest film performances of all time, specifically for Marlon Brando and a breakthrough role for Al Pacino. But it is the determination of a family on the brink of falling apart that keeps fans and critics calling this the greatest film of all time.
Something about the Corleone family has resonated with audiences for almost four decades. There’s just something about them that they can’t refuse.
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