"Once, there was this day... this one day when... everyone realized they needed each other." We watched the 2000s Katie Holmes Thanksgiving classic Pieces of April with a very special guest (Scott's sister Nicole), and do you happen to have an oven we can borrow? Thanksgiving is always a polarizing holiday for a lot of people. Intense family interactions, ethically questionable historical roots, travel obligations, and emotional strain. All of that and more is found in this tight little indie directed by Peter Hedges. Holmes plays April, a 21-year-old who's attempting to atone for how awful she was to her family growing up, as she attempts to cook Thanksgiving dinner for her mother dying of cancer (a terrific Patricia Clarkson), empathetic father (Oliver Platt), and her siblings (Allison Pill and John Gallagher Jr.) and grandmother (Alice Drummond). We talk about its Oscar-nominated performance by Patricia Clarkson, Katie Holmes' post-Dawson's Creek film work, and the complicated emotions going in its tight eighty minutes of screentime.

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