Rating: PG13
Genre:
Comedy Drama
Theatrical Release: 10/17/2003(USA
Release Date: 02/24/2004
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol
Dubbed: English/French
Sound: DD5.1
Run Time: 80 Minutes
Flags: Brief Nudity, Adult Language, Sexual Situations, Drug Content
Distributor/Studio: MGM
Novelist and screenwriter
Peter Hedges makes his directorial debut with the
comedy drama Pieces of April. Family outcast
April Burns (
Katie Holmes) lives in a beat-up apartment in New York's Lower East Side with her boyfriend,
Bobby (
Derek Luke). In order to spend some time with her dying mother,
Joy (
Patricia Clarkson),
April invites her conservative suburban family to her place for a Thanksgiving feast. She discovers that her oven is broken the morning of the big day, so she goes around her tenement building trying to find a sympathetic neighbor with a working oven. Though she doesn't know them, neighbors
Eugene (
Isiah Whitlock) and
Evette (
Lillias White) offer the use of their oven, but only for an hour. While she frantically tries to complete the meal, the family drives in from Pennsylvania sharing less-than-pleasant opinions about
April's lifestyle. Dad
Jim (
Oliver Platt) tries to think positively, while daughter
Beth (
Alison Pill) flaunts her good-girl status and son
Timmy (
John Gallagher Jr.) captures it all on film. Shot with digital video,
Pieces of April is a project of the
Independent Film Channel's
InDigEnt production company.
~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide