The November Canon: 12 Films for the Month Between the Costumes and the Tinsel
Cult slashers, French harvest romances, Bergman and a $3,500 killer turkey. Twelve deep-cut films for the forgotten month between Halloween and Christmas.
November is cinema's forgotten month. October gets horror marathons. December gets every Christmas movie ever made. November gets the same three Thanksgiving comedies your uncle quotes every year.
Not here. These are the November films that live in the back of the video store: cult slashers, French harvest romances, Swedish family wreckage, a turkey with a body count and a concert that served the audience Thanksgiving dinner. Cozy, then cruel, then cozy again. Start the morning after Halloween.
1. Alice's Restaurant (1969)
Arthur Penn followed Bonnie and Clyde with this shaggy counterculture curio built around Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute talking blues. Guthrie plays himself: a Thanksgiving dinner at a deconsecrated church, a littering arrest and a draft board that can't decide if he's fit to fight after being busted for throwing out the trash. It's funny, sad and very stoned, and it's the most honest picture of hippie friendship falling apart that Hollywood ever made.
2. Blood Rage (1987)
The Thanksgiving slasher before Thanksgiving slashers were cool. Twin brothers, a drive-in murder, a mental hospital escape and a Florida apartment complex hosting the worst holiday dinner in film history. Louise Lasser plays the mother, slowly losing her mind between bites of turkey. It's cheap, gory and deranged, and it was shot years before it came out. The restored version is a cult treasure. Don't eat the cranberry sauce.
3. The House of Yes (1997)
Parker Posey plays Jackie-O, a woman so obsessed with the Kennedy assassination she reenacts it in a pink suit. Her twin brother brings his fiancée home to McLean, Virginia, for Thanksgiving, and things get extremely, uncomfortably Gothic. Posey took home a special acting award at Sundance for this, and she earned it. Peak '90s indie: arch, filthy and genuinely unhinged.
4. The Daytrippers (1996)
Parker Posey again, because November belongs to her. The day after Thanksgiving, a Long Island woman (Hope Davis) finds what looks like a love letter to her husband, so her whole family piles into a station wagon and drives into Manhattan to confront him. With Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber and Anne Meara as the mother from hell. Greg Mottola's debut is tiny, sharp and sadder than you expect.
5. What's Cooking? (2000)
Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) follows four Los Angeles families, African American, Latino, Vietnamese and Jewish, through the same Thanksgiving Day. With Alfre Woodard, Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, Julianna Margulies and Kyra Sedgwick. Every kitchen has its own secrets, and they all come out by dessert. Nobody talks about this movie, and that's a crime.
6. Krisha (2015)
Trey Edward Shults made this on a tiny budget at his mother's house, casting his aunt, Krisha Fairchild, as a woman who shows up to her family's Thanksgiving trying to prove she's changed. It's shot like a horror film, and it feels like one. One of the most anxious movies ever made about a turkey in an oven.
7. ThanksKilling (2008)
Five college kids heading home for Thanksgiving break get stranded in the woods, and a demonic turkey named Turkie hunts them down. It was made for about $3,500 and it looks like it, and that's exactly the point. It's crude, stupid, hilarious and somehow a real cult hit. Watch it at 1 a.m. with friends who have no taste. You'll quote it until Christmas.
8. The Last Waltz (1978)
On Thanksgiving Day 1976, The Band played their farewell concert at Winterland in San Francisco, and Martin Scorsese filmed it. All 5,000 people in the audience were served a turkey dinner before the show. Then came Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. Still the greatest concert film ever made, and a Thanksgiving movie on a technicality we fully accept.
9. Autumn Sonata (1978)
Ingmar Bergman put Ingrid Bergman (no relation) in her final big-screen role as a famous concert pianist who visits the daughter she neglected (Liv Ullmann) after years apart. One long night, one piano and decades of resentment poured out like wine. Brutal, beautiful and the most November film ever made, in the sense that it will make you call your mother. Or block her.
10. Autumn Tale (1998)
Éric Rohmer's final "Tales of the Four Seasons" film is a gentle romantic comedy set among the vineyards of the Rhône valley as harvest season comes around. A widowed winemaker is too wrapped up in her vines to look for love, so her best friend secretly finds a man through a dating service, then dates him herself to vet him first. Warm, chatty and very French. Pour a glass of red and let it wash over you.
11. Old Joy (2006)
Kelly Reichardt's quiet masterpiece follows two old friends (Daniel London and musician Will Oldham) on a weekend trip to a hot spring in the Oregon woods. Not much happens. Everything happens. It's about the friendships that fade without either person saying so, and it's the most November-feeling film on this list: wet, green, gray and aching.
12. The Humans (2021)
Stephen Karam adapted his own Tony-winning play about a family's Thanksgiving in a crumbling Chinatown apartment where the pipes bang, the lights die and everyone's secrets come out. Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, Amy Schumer, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun and June Squibb. It's a family drama that's also, quietly, a ghost story.
How to Do November Right
Watch one a week. Start with Alice's Restaurant on the first Saturday. Save Krisha and Autumn Sonata for when you're feeling brave. Put on The Last Waltz while you cook. End with Blood Rage the night after Thanksgiving, when the leftovers are still warm and your relatives have finally left.
Christmas can wait. November is ours.
Keep it loud
