Thanksgiving (Movie)

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    ‘Breaking,’ ‘Thanksgiving’ and More Streaming Gems

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    Crime thrillers, a crackling slasher and a documentary exploration of a rare Beatles failure are among our recommendations for your streaming subscription services this month.‘Breaking’ (2022)Stream it on Paramount+.John Boyega is electrifying — sympathetic, credible, and scary — in Abi Damaris Corbin’s sensitive “Dog Day Afternoon”-style crime drama. Corbin dramatizes the story of Brian Brown-Easley, a desperate ex-Marine on the verge of homelessness who took over a Marietta, Ga., bank and held hostages, demanding the return of disability checks unfairly garnished by the VA. The tropes of such a story are firmly established, and there are few narrative surprises of note. But “Breaking” is firmly anchored by the terrific performances, with Boyega’s harrowing star turn nicely supplemented by Nicole Beharie’s cool-as-a-cucumber bank manager and the great Michael K. Williams as the sensible police hostage negotiator.‘Thanksgiving’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Eli Roth’s holiday slasher began as a fake trailer, sandwiched between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s segments of the 2007 exploitation movie valentine “Grindhouse.” Roth opens this feature-length expansion with an impeccably staged, blood-spurting melee at a Black Friday sale — a sequence that’s gloriously meanspirited and occasionally stomach-turning, and easily the single best set piece of his career to date. The rest of the picture almost lives up to it; Roth knows how to build suspense, and he constructs a fine mixture of gory kills, snarky laughs and outrageous Massachusetts accents. (Its only major flaw is its slavishness to that trailer, which means that, as with trailers made after the movies they’re advertising, some of the best moments have already been given away.) It’s a thoroughly entertaining horror effort, designed and executed in gleefully bad taste.‘The Trust’ (2016)Stream it on Max.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eli Roth Takes a Stab at Thanksgiving Horror

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      Ever since he was a boy, the director has wanted to make a gory movie about the holiday. “Thanksgiving” is adapted from his 2007 faux trailer.For almost every holiday, there’s a horror movie, from “My Bloody Valentine” to “Black Christmas.” Thanksgiving, too. But the turkeys-beware holiday gets its own namesake movie with Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving,” featuring an ensemble cast that includes Addison Rae, Patrick Dempsey and Gina Gershon.The movie (now in theaters) is based on the gory faux trailer Roth made all the way back in 2007 for “Grindhouse,” Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s homage to exploitation cinema. “Thanksgiving” centers on a masked killer who dresses like the pilgrim John Carver and terrorizes modern-day Plymouth, Mass., a year after a deadly Black Friday department store doorbusters riot.In a recent phone interview, Roth said that he and Jeff Rendell, a childhood friend and his screenwriter on the new film, have been itching to make a Thanksgiving scary movie since they were kids.“There was that lull between October and mid-December when it was all family films,” said Roth, who’s from Newton, Mass. “We were just waiting for another horror movie to come out. Our dream was to fill that void.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘Thanksgiving’ Review: Gobble, Gobble, Gasp

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      From a fake genre trailer comes a full horror meal, courtesy of Eli Roth.The origin of this seasonal slasher is in an ersatz trailer the horror filmmaker Eli Roth made for the portmanteau movie “Grindhouse” in 2007. The two lurid features directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were separated by a series of teasers for imaginary movies concocted by like-minded pals of the filmmakers, also including Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright. Believe it or not, Roth’s feature-length version of “Thanksgiving” is the third such trailer to get its Pinocchio-esque real-movie wish.The movie posited in that trailer was, of course, a way-trashy variant on John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” Roth’s feature realization, scripted by Jeff Rendell from a story by both Rendell and Roth, opens with a Carpenter tribute, a shot from an unknown point of view, approaching a door, perhaps menacingly.What follows is different: Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Mass., celebrated by two families, one lower-middle class, one affluent. The turkey and pie are interrupted in both households by the run up to an early Black Friday sale at the big box store owned by the affluent clan. The store is overrun by a mob of unusually lumpen bargain hunters, and the riot that ensues is a bloody doozy, coming off like an amalgam of George A. Romero and Jean-Luc Godard. No, really.That’s the thing about Roth, who’s coming back to the undiluted horror that made him notorious (see “Hostel”) after the career detours of a “Death Wish” remake and the altogether more wholesome “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” both from 2018. He’s not a poetic horror moviemaker; he doesn’t dwell on eerie atmosphere. Any calm that exists in his pictures is just there to set up a jump scare. Horror for him is a blunt instrument. The thing is, he knows his stuff and he’s very adept at serving up both gross-outs and real leap-from-your-seat moments.As for those gross-outs: if you know the fake trailer for this movie, you know they included a genuinely objectionable knife-through-a-trampoline gag, and a terribly improbable human turkey gag. Spoiler alert: a toned-down version of the former and a ramped-up version of the latter feature here. Like his exploitation feature forebears, who include not just Romero but Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and on the arguably minus side, Sean S. Cunningham (the man behind another holiday horror, “Friday the 13th”) Roth enjoys imagining and then simulating lacerations of the body parts you’d least like to be wounded in, but his sadism also has a wicked wit.The scenario, in which an unknown lunatic seeks to avenge the casualties of the aforementioned riot one year later, of course features a group of beleaguered teens. Their primary member, Jessica, is the daughter of the mega-mart’s venal owner, but also the one family member with a real conscience. Nell Verlaque, who plays her, turns in a better performance than the role genuinely calls for. Patrick Dempsey, recently designated People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, takes the role of the town sheriff, which here is not as thankless a role as it is customarily. The movie also includes a Black Sabbath joke that is both funny and accurate.ThanksgivingRated R for grisly violence, language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. More