Rating: 
Summary: 3 1/2 Stars: Make the Cranberries from Scratch!
Review: The Holidays mean Family Gatherings and April (Katie Holmes) has invited her estranged family up from the country into NYC for a Thanksgiving Dinner prepared by none other than herself; seemingly the first complete meal she has ever prepared and certainly the first Thanksgiving one.
"Pieces of April" is divided into two sections: the quarreling family making the trek to NYC and April attempting to prepare the dinner hampered by an oven that doesn't work and neighbors who at least at first are not willing to help her.
Most of what goes on is sweet, heartfelt and relentlessly quirky and the whole movie is held together by the luminous presence of Katie Holmes.
Director Peter Hedges doesn't have much to say that is new in regards to families but his take on this film is much akin to "you can't live with them and you can't live without them." Patricia Clarkson and particularly Oliver Platt as April's parents add to the overall compassionate, loving nature of Hedges point of view and "Pieces of April" is definitely a palliative to acidic "Home for the Holidays" of a few years back.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb - Peter Hedges is a genius
Review: I adore both 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' and 'About a Boy' and can say I'm thrilled with Peter Hedges's first directorial effort. I wish everyone could see this film. Katie Holmes, as well as every member of the supporting cast delivers a strong, believable performance. In typical Hedges style, every character is complex and realistic. This movie feels real - every frame feels as if it's a home movie, or a documentary of a real family. I highly recommmend this film.
Rating:
Summary: Fine Family film that is quirky enough to be memorable.
Review: Pieces of April is a really good film that deals with death, and family. Katie Holmes is great as April, a young girl who is trying to make her first thanksgiving dinner for her family to please her mother is fighting cancer. The ordeal this young lady is put though is funny and heart warming all at the same time, and the message it sends is poignant. Kudos to Oliver Platt and Patricia Clarkson for great supporting turns as her parents.Four stars.
Rating:
Summary: Moving, funny, sad, and intensely human
Review: About thirty minutes into this film, I must confess that I didn't think I was going to like it, but I ended up liking it a great deal. The first problem I had was the look of the film, with an exceptionally grainy cast to the images, made worse by a series of extreme close ups, and bleached out colors. The film never ended up looking good, but the it bothered me less as it went on. The second thing that bothered me was that the set up seemed a bit too stereotypical: black sheep of the family April living in squalor in another town (New York City) makes a Thanksgiving dinner for her disapproving family (loving but sometimes overwhelmed father, younger and negativistic sister, go-with-the-flow younger brother, grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's, and hypercritical, cold, and unloving mother, who is undergoing--probably futility--chemotherapy for breast cancer). Of course, everything starts going wrong and gets worse (April and her boyfriend obviously have no culinary skills, oven is broken and she has extreme difficulty finding anyone who can help her, her mother in the car bringing her family to NYC is constantly berating April and creating a poisoned atmosphere, etc.), and I felt the whole thing was a bit too predictable (which it in part remained). But at some point about halfway through the film, I really started enjoying the film. Sure, it still looked bad, but I started enjoying getting to know the characters, I began to find the humor more and more biting, and I started to want her family to be pleasantly surprised at April's almost heroic efforts to create perhaps the last good day they would all have as a family. I was also enjoying some of the quirky neighbors we meet, including a very helpful middle-aged African American couple living below her, and a bizarre upstairs neighbor with a nice, new stove (played by Sean Hayes of WILL AND GRACE). Things both at April's apartment, with her boyfriend (who unhappily runs into her drug dealer ex-boyfriend just before the dinner starts), and inside the car get worse and worse until everything apparently collapses. And then, perhaps a bit too neatly, everything is put back together again. But just like the characters in the film, we in the end want everything to be nice and pleasant, and it isn't at all hard acceding to that inclination. I liked the cast a great deal. Oliver Platt (he and NOT Will Ferrell should be starring in A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES!) is as excellent as always, and Patricia Clarkson is outstanding as April's dying and acerbic mother. She is especially funny in the scene where she smokes dope (to counteract the effects of the chemo) and seems to rewind to her youth in the car. Katie Holmes is made to be as unlovely as it is possible to make her, but she still possesses enough wounded charm to make us root for her making her dinner a success. Indeed, her ongoing struggles both against fate and against her own culinary ineptness renders her as quite the heroine by the end of the film. This film isn't for everyone. It is a bit bleak, and it isn't the prettiest film in the world to look at, and fans of DAWSON'S CREEK might want to see a prettier Katie Holmes, but if one can get past all this, one just might discover that this is a funny, inspiring, and moving film.
Rating: 
Summary: A Perfect Thanksgiving Movie
Review: I saw this film at a special pre-screening in Boston, with writer/director Peter Hedges and actor Oliver Platt present to do a Q & A after the film. I was pleased and relieved that when the lights came up at the end, I was able to compliment them on their work. "April" feels like a traditional Thanksgiving movie, so much so that you wonder, why hasn't anyone done this before? The parallel stories of the family's road trip from Connecticut to New York City and April's chaotic attempt to cook the Thanksgiving dinner compliment each other nicely as the film reaches its emotional conclusion. It's a bit of a happy-ending film, but that's okay. It's a holiday movie, and Hedges -- using some of his own personal experiences -- brings together the tragic and the comic to build a surprisingly heartfelt and accurate holiday scene. Each character is specifically built, with distinct traits, but none ever slide into charicature. The dying mom, the stoic father, the good boyfriend, the perfect middle sister: these are all figures each of us has known in our lives and, likely as not, in some way in our own families. I would hope that Hedges's "Pieces of April" is a small, heartfelt film just big enough to touch the world.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth It
Review: Pieces of April is badly advertised as a comedy. True, it has some dark humor, but if you're lookig for giggles and fits, search elsewhere. The most humorous part was perhaps the making of special feature in which the director is humiliating. The entire movie is while cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving. Too much detail in the cooking process. If not in April's small apartment building, much of the movie takes place in her family's car. Also, the camerawork needs to be talked about. Poor, poor camerawork. Bad lighting. i could go on. Only buy this item if you have rented it and liked it. Or if you like dark humor, or any of the actors in it. The acting is not spectacular, nor is the script. Some aspects are good, but not enough for me.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, quirky and cute
Review: April lives in a small apartment and has always been the black sheep -- drugging and what-have-you. She decides to cook a Thanksgiving feast for her family (cancer-stricken mom, nice father, forgetful grandmother, earnest sister and silly brother). Unfortunately, her stove has broken. Thus starts a movie of April meeting her neighbors in an effort to find a stove to cook her bird in (witness one neighbor rescind her offer of a stove when she realizes as a vegan she cannot ethically smell flesh cooking.) The best is the African-American couple downstairs who get shocked at April wanting to use canned cranberry suace ("NOBODY likes it from the can," they emphasize when April says she likes it from the can.) Meanwhile, her family drives while fighting to April's house. So ... do they make it? Does April cook the bird? Is it a good or bad Thanksgiving for all? Watch this and see.
Rating:
Summary: Touching And Funny
Review: Katie Holmes stars in the comedy "Pieces of April". It uniquely combines drama and comedy brilliantly. The writers prove that they know where to place the substances. It contains lots of unique humor that is rarely used in other films. Most of it comes unexpectedly, which keeps audiences' eyes wide open for every second. As the struggles increase, the intensity increases. The two story lines combine as one movie greatly: April struggling to create the perfect Thanksgiving get-together at her apartment and her estranged family traveling there with a lot of drama. Though the film runs only seventy-four minutes, the cast and crew made perfect use of what they had. Katie Holmes is wonderful in her role of April, which asides her from her previous works due to her wardrobe and her lifestyle. She proves that she will stay in the spotlight for many more years. Patricia Clarkson shines in her Oscar nominated role as April's mother, who's dying of cancer. All other actors also perform their roles wonderfully: Oliver Platt, Sean Hayes, and more. Everyone, including Holmes and Clarkson, offers their own sense of genre, which adds more flavor to the film. "Pieces of April" is a great film for those looking for a unique comedy. This is sure to please many audiences for a long time. The laughs will keep coming regardless amount of viewings. They never get old. This is one scene to anticipate: April talking to a 911 operator: "Hi! I'd like to report a kidnapping. There's a guy holding my turkey hostage. My turkey....my turkey....my turkey."
Rating:
Summary: Cute little movie
Review: Charming movie with many amusing moments and some fine performances. It feels perhaps a couple of pebbles heavier than the pilot of a TV sitcom. I think that with more focus & commitment it might have become a low-budget American Amelie, although the cute but essentially charmless leading lady does ultimately drag it down.
Rating:
Summary: What a wonderfull movie ... it's a blast ...
Review: OK so everybody says that it's a movie about a dysfunction family ... LOL ... well I disagree, believe me if a movie crew and a director came into most families during a Thanksgiving dinner we would probably discover that many of our own family members could be considered as pretty wierd and dysfunctional. Matter of fact I'd kinda say a dysfunctional family is the normal family ... Yup the days of June Cleaverand 'the Baeaver' are long long gone .....
April Burns played by Katie Holmes decides to invite her estranged family for a Thanksgiving dinner at her pretty well slum like apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She gets up in the morning to find her gas stove broken, her boyfriend has already left to surprise her by buying a new suit, and the turkey is frozen. On the other hand her family is driving to NY and needless to say there is a lot of trepidadtion cause April is the black sheep of the family. April's mom played by Oscar nominated (for this role) Patricia Clarkson is a cancer victim and pretty wild in her own right. It's not a stretch to imagine mom and daughter getting together and sparks literally flying ....
Although Clarkson got the nomination I think that Katie Holmes playing April is nothing short of stupendous and plays a very very believable and lovable role without coming across as white trash .....
As far as character studies its one of the better written movies I have seen for some time ... you'll love to vicariously watch a family go through the annual agony of that famous 'family' Thanksgiving dinner ... and no year is complete without it ......
| 
