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.
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