Families -- what are you gonna do with 'em, huh? Well, if you're a filmmaker, you take most of your experiences with them and make some cinema out of them.

There have been family feuds popping off all over the big screen lately. Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited" has three brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) bickering their way through a train trip across India after their father's passing. In "Margot at the Wedding," director Noah Baumbach has Nicole Kidman play a neurotic mom who comes home to attend (and not-so-quietly judge) the wedding of her little sis (Jennifer Jason Leigh). And in Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages," which just began playing Triangle theaters last weekend, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who also recently played the scheming big brother to a weak-willed Ethan Hawke in Sidney Lumet's botched-heist flick/intense family drama "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead") are siblings who must confront their painful past -- and their own stalled present -- as they put their mentally deteriorating father (Philip Bosco) in a nursing home.

While all these films carry the common thread of siblings as main protagonists, often at odds with one another, these films also focus on people trying to come to terms with their parents -- who are either deceased, estranged or about to be deceased -- and their contentious history.

For "Savages," Jenkins says she drew from her experiences of seeing her father and grandmother suffer from dementia.

"The film isn't, you know, a direct, autobiographical tract or something," says the 45-year-old filmmaker. "Although there's a lot of emotional material that I really knew about. Even if it's not my exact scenario, with my grandmother and my father, it was an emotional landscape that I really knew about, from my own experience."

With "Savages," Jenkins says she had the opportunity to make a film that dealt with brother-sister relationships. More specifically, brothers and sisters who, even in middle age, can't seem to let go of the past, preventing them from having a more stable present.

"I mean, the characters that Laura and Phil play, they're sort of stuck," she says. "I always said to the production designer when we were figuring out what their homes would look like, I'd say, 'Oh, they live in a postgrad school stupor.' Even though they're 40 years old, or close to it on either side, they're not embracing an adulthood in any normal way. There's nothing permanent about their lives at all."

New York Times film critic Matt Zoller Seitz found that same stuck pattern in "Darjeeling," which was No. 3 on his 10-best list for 2007.

"I was a bit surprised of reviews saying that film is about brotherly love," Seitz says. "It's also about how you love your brothers because you're stuck with each other. They love each other, but they don't particularly like each other. They all have their own separate personalities, but when they get together, they're like 'the brothers,' taking on the same roles. That seemed very real."

Seitz finds that it isn't just sibling-filled movies that are dissecting parent-child relationships. Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," like nearly all the films Anderson has made, deals with the subject of fathers and sons. In the movie, Daniel Day-Lewis' misanthropic oil man doesn't have love for anyone, except the orphan he raises as a son. Even that relationship turns sour.

Says Seitz, "Anderson took an evolutionary leap as a filmmaker. It's the first one where the emphasis was on the father figure. It was from the point of view of Daniel Plainview. That was unexpected."

But filmmakers serving up their family issues, especially parental issues, has been a constant occurrence in cinema.

Elisabeth Benfey, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University who teaches screenwriting, says they are the kind of films traditionally made in Europe, citing works such as "Scenes From a Marriage" by Ingmar Bergman. It makes sense that independent films, in particular, would feature these relational aspects, she says, because they are usually first movies, or close to the beginning of the writer/director's career. "These stories are what shapes us," she says.

"What's very interesting is that in the authenticity [of the films], people recognize themselves. There is a sense of truth that touches them in a way that an adventure movie doesn't."

Benfey saw this up close when she went to see "The Savages," last week. The audience responded to the film at times with awkward laughter and odd silences. "It's almost like group therapy," she says. "It allows you a way to reflect on your life.

"You respond to something very deep, but it's not for the faint of heart," she says.

While Seitz insists that filmmakers and artists in general implant their own baggage in films, "and family issues are right there at the top," Jenkins says that for some filmmakers, it's less about working out issues on-screen and creating something that resonates with audiences. And what subject resonates more universally than family?

"Often times," remembers Jenkins, "at screenings, someone would raise their hand during a Q and A or they would approach me after the Q and A and they would volunteer these really intense stories of their own experience, with their parents or their grandparents or their sister. It was very moving."

Benfey agrees. "In the long run, these movies are going to be the ones that reveal how we live now."