Home for the Holidays

Home for the Holidays (1995) is a comedy-drama directed by Jodie Foster that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., and Anne Bancroft. On one spectacularly bad Thursday, Claudia Larson loses her job, kisses her boss for all the wrong reasons, and learns her daughter won't be around for Thanksgiving. So she gets on a plane home — which is where the real trouble starts.

Her parents' house is a pressure cooker. Her mother is theatrical, her father is somewhere else mentally, her sister has cultivated a perfect life and will not let you forget it, and her brother Tommy shows up with a friend nobody knows what to make of. Grievances from twenty years ago surface between the turkey and the pie. Robert Downey Jr. is a one-man explosion in every scene he shares with Hunter — their chemistry is the actual film.

Foster isn't after warmth here. She's interested in why people who love each other are so capable of making each other miserable over a four-day holiday. It's a sharper picture than the seasonal packaging suggests. Stream Home for the Holidays (1995) on iFILM.