THE HOLDOVERS

 Christmas movies I tend to avoid; Alexander Payne movies I race to see and all the better if Paul Giamatti is in there somewhere. In "The Holdovers", (a Christmas classic and certainly the best you will see this season), Giamatti isn't just in there, he's right at the centre and giving an Oscar-worthy performance. 'The holdovers' of the title are boarding school boys who don't get to go home for the holidays and Giamatti is the housemaster whose job it is to hold them over and ensure they have a good Christmas; the trouble is, he's a curmudgeon.

Of course, Payne may have put a curmudgeon up front but he makes sweet movies; sweet and funny with perhaps a slightly bitter edge to them and ten minutes in I'm sure you'll see the ghost of "Dead Poet's Society" standing in the wings just as you know Payne will never pull out the sentimental stops that that movie did and that's still in the sure and certain knowledge that nobody can play a curmudgeon as well as Paul Giamatti.

But there is someone else being 'held over' during the holidays, too; the school's kitchen manager, cook and general dogsbody with a heart twice the size of her ample figure, no husband and a dead son and you know if anyone can melt Giamatti's cold, cold heart it'll be her and she's underplayed superbly by Da'Vine Joy Randolph almost certainly on her way to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar but then all the performances are superb with newcomer Dominic Sessa outstanding. Yes, this is a Christmas movie to melt the hardest of hearts and one of the best films of 2023.

SALTBURN

 If you think "Brideshead Revisited" by way of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" you will certainly be on the right road to "Saltburn" which is the title of Emerald Fennell's very dark comedy...and therein lies the problem; we have been here before though to be fair to Fennell perhaps not quite as perversely as this. It is the story of Oliver, seemingly from a broken home and fresh up at Oxford on a scholarship, who casts his eyes over the unapproachably gorgeous Felix, (Jacob Elordi, soon to be seen as Elvis in "Priscilla"), and says to himself, 'I want him' or at least, 'I want what he's got'. When he tells Felix he can't face going home for the summer Felix invites him to spend it with his obnoxiously eccentric family at Saltburn.

So far, so familiar but all isn't as it seems with Oliver, played magnificently by Barry Keoghan and cast at last as the main actor. For starters, there's another house guest at Saltburn, (Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, a petulant little snob who has it in for Oliver), but then Oliver isn't quite as backward as he lets on to be. Mooching nicely between satirical dark comedy and outright thriller material "Saltburn" looks, for about three quarters of its length, like it mightn't be going anywhere special; just another movie redeemed by Keoghan's acting but then Fennell gives us and the film that ninety degree turn we have been waiting for but didn't see coming so the final half hour is one nasty, brilliant hoot.

Not only that, but the film's actual ending is the best I've seen this year and ten out of ten to both Fennell and Keoghan for pulling it off. If only we could have had more of this earlier on. All the performances are fine, of course. Fennell, being an actress herself, clearly knows how to bring out the best in her cast. Elordi hasn't just got the looks but the acting chops to go with them. As ever Rosamund Pike as the superficial sweetness and light mother steals all her scenes and there's a terrific cameo from Carey Mulligan as another house guest but again it's Keoghan's film from first to last; he might just be the best actor of his generation.

RANCHO NOTORIOUS

 Fritz Lang's superlative western teeters dangerously on the edge of camp, (it's that infernal 'Legend of Chuck-a-Luck' ballad pounding away on the soundtrack, continually reminding us that this is a tale of 'hate ... murder and revenge'). Then, of course, there is that great gay icon Marlene Dietrich, looking extraordinary at fifty one as Altar Keane, boss of the outlaw hideout Chuck-a-Luck where Arthur Kennedy comes seeking the man who killed his girl in a robbery. In many respects the film is a perfect companion to Nicholas Ray's not dissimilar "Johnny Guitar", made around the same time and both featuring dominant women and weaker men and both dealing explicitly with 'hate, murder and revenge'.

This is a very tight piece of work, thematically dense and psychologically astute and directed by Lang in a truly classical style. It affords all the pleasures that a really good western should while still falling perfectly within a milieu recognizable from many of Lang's American works. "Johnny Guitar's" veiled lesbianism together with Nicholas Ray's growing reputation may have given it the edge but this, too, is a remarkable film, an essential work by one of the cinema's greatest directors.