The Friedmans (Capturing The Friedmans)
The Slocumbs (Igby Goes Down)
The Family: An old-money New York institution, fuelled by resentment and bitterness.
Kids hate parents, parents hate each other, kids hate each other… you get the idea.
Strangest Member: Mimi, the spectacularly vicious matriarch.
She describes Igby’s conception as an act of animosity… to Igby!
Gee, thanks mum.
The Whites (Carrie)
The Family: An awkward teenage girl with burgeoning telekinetic powers and her religious fanatic of a mother.
It’s fair to say the two don’t see eye to eye.
Strangest Member: On balance, we’ll award it to the mother.
And given her daughter’s extraordinary temper, that’s saying something…
The Hoods (The Ice Storm)
The Family: A chronically uncommunicative bunch who find themselves wrapped up in their own problems.
The parents’ marriage is dead in the water, the daughter is worryingly sexually precocious and the son has a flourishing drug habit.
Welcome to suburbia!
Strangest Member: Young Paul, who drugs his friend in an attempt to get into Katie Holmes’ pants, before accidentally drugging her too.
Enough with the drugs!
The Goldfarbs (Requiem For A Dream)
The Family: A young man and his grandmother, both of whom suffer from crippling problems with drugs. Not your average family dynamic.
Strangest Member: The tragic Sara, an ageing widow whose obsession with recapturing her youth leads her down a very dark path indeed.
The Pack (The Hills Have Eyes)
The Family: A collection of hungry cannibals living in the Nevada desert, where a ready supply of stranded travellers provides them with regular sustenance.
Strangest Member: Papa Jupiter, the ferocious patriarch.
He’s been killing since he was knee-high to a grasshopper…
The Huff-Dobacks (Step Brothers)
The Family: A fairly normal married couple, and their utterly beserk children, Brennan and Dale.
We know love conquers all, but these two really do push that maxim to the limit.
Strangest Member: It’s a tough one to call, but Will Ferrell’s Brennan probably shades it in the gibbering man-child stakes.
The Fockers (Meet The Fockers)
The Family: Any parents who would name their child Gaylord Focker must surely be a bit bizarre, and so it proves, courtesy of a deliriously OTT pair of performances from Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
Strangest Member: The prodigious liberal Bernie, who thinks nothing of discussing his son’s former masturbatory habits over dinner with the in-laws.
The McDunnoughs (Raising Arizona)
The Family: Unable to conceive or adopt, the McDunnoughs find themselves a third way, by kidnapping a baby to call their own.
Can’t envisage any problems there…
Strangest Member: Herbert, if only for that daft hair and tache…
The Jarretts (Ordinary People)
The Family: An upper-middle-class family that swiftly falls apart following the death of a teenage son.
Depression, resentment and guilt are pretty much all that’s left.
Strangest Member: Beth, the mother, who gradually shuts down to the point where she’s incapable of loving anyone or anything.
Bummer.
