Home Alone

Without Catherine O’Hara, without a mother’s love, without “KEVIN!”, Home Alone would not work. We’d merely live vicariously through Macaulay Culkin’s eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, finally free from yuletide family drama, living off fast food and film noir. It’s O’Hara who gives Kate McCallister, and John Hughes’ Christmas classic, a beating heart worth canonizing. Ever The Second City star, she is elastic, bounding between soft glow and hard power as ’90s shoulder-pad matriarchy warrants. Her affectionate, aerobic performance makes Kevin and Kate’s reunion worth rooting for — and as joyous as booby-trapping burglars. Joyous, too, is her reunion with John Candy thanks to his friend Hughes and SCTV fan Chris Columbus. Even 60 sleepless hours later, traversing from Chicago to Paris and back again, O’Hara’s McCallister finds reason to smile in a packed van with a polka troupe. More than