There's one comic beat buried deep in The Family that explains why Luc Besson thought this mob comedy would be worth making. Relocated with his biological family to a rural village in the Normandy region of France after betraying his Brooklyn-based professional "family," ex-Mafioso Fred Blake a.k.a. Giovanni Manzoni (Robert De Niro) is the guest of honor at a special movie screening hosted by the town's film society. The movie on the docket is Some Came Running, the 1958 Frank Sinatra/Dean Matrin film, but -- quel dommage! -- they've mistakenly been sent the print for another movie, a Martin Scorsese picture. I'll give you one guess as to which… and no, Kundun and Hugo would be the wrong picks.

Avoid the crowds at the multiplex by seeking out some of these independent films over the long holiday weekend:

Sam Mendes and Alan Ball's 1999 Oscar winner American Beauty has a lot of sins to answer for, one of which is the subsequent existence of movies like The Family Tree. Like its predecessor, this irritating "ain't the suburbs wacky?" dark comedy tells the story of a dysfunctional family that's made up of the tightly-wound, sex-obsessed fortysomething patriarch Jack (Dermot Mulroney), his bitchy wife Bunnie (Hope Davis) and their snarky adolescent daughter Kelly (Brittany Robertson). There's even a religious nut in the form of their teenage son Eric (Max Thieriot), who has recently found God and now spends much of his time shooting the shit (as well as a few firearms) with his pastor, Reverend Diggs (Keith Carridine). It's all so familiar that while watching the film, you may feel as if you stepped into a time machine that's transported you back to that pre-iPod, pre-Netflix era of the late '90s.

Tyler Perry, whom I always think of as The Busiest Man in showbiz, is about to get a little busier. The writer/director just signed a three-year first look deal with Lionsgate, wherein he has promised the studio three more films in addition to giving them first dibs on any other films of his within that time frame. The studio already has two upcoming Perry movies, The Family That Preys which comes out in September, and Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, set for a February release, neither of which are included in the deal.