Studies indicate that the impact of family involvement may be the most important predictor of successful psychiatric hospitalization of adolescents. Yet the ability to engage both an adolescent and his or her family in family therapy in the context of what is often an involuntary hospitalization is a major challenge. A number of promising family-based treatments have been studied in adolescents, but the literature on family-based interventions in the hospital setting has been limited to anecdotal reports. Making family engagement even more difficult is the pressure to take care of an increasing number of adolescents needing hospitalization with a decreasing length of stay. Recognizing the critical need to engage highly stressed adolescents and families in family therapy despite these challenges, a unique exercise that uses movies to facilitate family engagement in hospitalized adolescents has been developed. Through an engaging movie, patients are able to see problems similar to their own at a safe distance. Such an icebreaker is ideal for hospitalized adolescents and their families, whose conflicts may be too overwhelming to be addressed directly. The movie replaces the awkward silences and angry exchanges of visiting hours with an entertaining exercise that brings the family together. In the facilitated family discussion following the movie, the movie's themes become a springboard to the two goals of the intervention: improving communication and applying the movie to the family's own crisis. With thoughtful movie selection and targeted discussions to address communication and the family's own crisis, the movie intervention can help empower a family to navigate its way through a crisis together. (Contains 2 tables.)