Falling on its basted face in an attempt to match Home for the Holidays as an angsty Thanksgiving favorite, this glum dramedy glaringly tightens the vise on the intrafamilial tension, even employing a score that sounds like a jack-in-the-box crank. Peter Bogdanovich’s boozy, downtrodden patriarch may be both slyly droll and bluntly persuasive, but his near-insufferable surroundings include a parade of generic spats with the resident black sheep, Nina (Alicia Witt, stuck playing a shrill, poor man’s version of Anne Hathaway’s character from Rachel Getting Married). Writer-director Will Slocombe preaches the values of laying resentments on the table, but with no true wisdom or novelty to offer, he’s merely served an instantly forgettable slice of cinema de dysfunction.
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