mandatory family fun

Films about a family that a crisis forces back into the same room, car or house: a funeral, a holiday, a road trip, or the end of the world.

Most of the crises are ordinary ones. In Little Miss Sunshine, a family piles into an old van and drives to California so little Olive can enter a beauty pageant. After their father dies, four grown siblings are made to move back into their childhood home for a week in This Is Where I Leave You. In Death at a Funeral, an English family with more than a few skeletons buries its patriarch, and the day goes wrong one calamity at a time. Claudia Larson has just lost her job when she has to spend Thanksgiving with her family in Home for the Holidays.

Then there are the families whose crisis is the end of the world. The Mitchells are on a road trip to drop Katie at film school in The Mitchells vs. the Machines when the robot uprising starts, and the whole family becomes humanity's unlikeliest last hope. A cosmic event rips Oak Street out of suburbia in The End of Oak Street, and the Platt family finds that their survival depends on sticking together. Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker estranged from his two children, has to protect them from alien invaders in War of the Worlds. In A Quiet Place, the Abbotts are trying to survive in upstate New York among predators drawn to noise, so the whole family has to stay silent.

The world can end and somebody will still bring up 2004.