What's Cooking?

(2000, USA/United Kingdom) 
Director: Gurinder Chadha 
Starring: Joan Chen ; Julianna Margulies ; Alfre Woodard 

How many Thanksgivings have you had to endure where you wanted to stuff a drumstick up a relative instead of into your mouth? Well, that's all about to change -- that's if you take your kin to What's Cooking before the bird's done. 

This season-specific flick spotlights four ethnicities (Jewish, African American, Vietnamese, and Hispanic) and how their members celebrate the previously all-white, all-Protestant/Catholic, and all-straight holiday. 

The poor beleaguered kosher folk here have to deal with their very-out lesbian daughter (Kyra Sedgwick) bringing home her lover (Julianna Margulies) for an overnighter. If they think they've got a reason to kvetch, they should only know what's cooking in the rest of the picture: annoying mothers-in-law, black activist sons, condoms, guns, interracial couplings, adultery, vegetarians, and canned cranberry sauce. 

This is not great cinema. It's feel-good cinema, and it works without resorting to coyness. Well, not too much coyness. 

As for Sedgwick and Margulies, whether they're giggling over a turkey baster or cuddling closer when Mom (Lanie Kazan) delivers them breakfast in bed, you believe in their attraction to each other and the strength they create in their unity as a couple. Now if they only had a love scene with gravy. ... 

--Brandon Judell

Source : Obtained from planetout.com