The Holdovers
Academy Award × 1
Rent/Purchase
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
What critics thought
Nearly universally praised, The Holdovers won critics over with Giamatti's performance, its richly evoked 1970s New England atmosphere, and a bittersweet emotional register that drew comparisons to Hal Ashby and Frank Capra. The sharpest dissent came from those who found the film's warmth a carefully constructed illusion — sentimental machinery dressed up as earned feeling — and who felt the period setting conveniently sidestepped the political turbulence of the era it inhabits.
“Even as the story accrues the heft of personal tragedy, each scene seems to float or bob.”
Wesley Morris·The New York Times
“doesn't only have the look and feel of that time period, it resuscitates the finest elements of its narrative traditions”
Ann Hornaday·The Washington Post
“a pile of clichés”
The New Yorker
“a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one”
Justin Chang·Los Angeles Times
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorAlexander Payne
StarringPaul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner
ComposerMark Orton
The Holdovers
Academy Award × 1
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
What critics thought
Nearly universally praised, The Holdovers won critics over with Giamatti's performance, its richly evoked 1970s New England atmosphere, and a bittersweet emotional register that drew comparisons to Hal Ashby and Frank Capra. The sharpest dissent came from those who found the film's warmth a carefully constructed illusion — sentimental machinery dressed up as earned feeling — and who felt the period setting conveniently sidestepped the political turbulence of the era it inhabits.
“Even as the story accrues the heft of personal tragedy, each scene seems to float or bob.”
Wesley Morris·The New York Times
“doesn't only have the look and feel of that time period, it resuscitates the finest elements of its narrative traditions”
Ann Hornaday·The Washington Post
“a pile of clichés”
The New Yorker
“a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one”
Justin Chang·Los Angeles Times
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorAlexander Payne
StarringPaul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner
ComposerMark Orton
Rent/Purchase