The Holdovers (2023)
Director: Alexander Payne Run Time: 133 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Carrie Preston, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Gillian Vigman, Paul Giamatti
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere, 2023 Telluride Film Festival
Official Selection, 2023 Toronto Film Festival
The Holdovers (2023) received five nominations at the 96th Academy Awards, winning Best Supporting Actress (Randolph). Both Randolph and Paul Giamatti won Golden Globe Awards for their performances. The film also received four nominations at this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards.
“wistful and heartwarming and without a shred of cynicism”
—Tomris Laffly, The Wrap
From acclaimed director Alexander Payne, The Holdovers (2023) follows a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who 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.
About the filmmaker:
Alexander Payne is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, film director, and producer known for dark satires and family dramas. He studied history and Spanish literature at Stanford University before earning his MFA in film directing at UCLA. In 1996, he premiered his first feature film Citizen Ruth (1996) at Sundance, and followed it up with Election (1999), which earned him Best Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as his first Academy Award nomination. In 2002, About Schmidt (2002) was screened as a preview at Cannes before opening the New York Film Festival. Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011) each won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and were nominated in four other categories, including Best Film Editing and Best Director. His other acclaimed features include Nebraska (2013) and Downsizing (2017), which opened the 2017 Venice Film Festival.
Payne reunited with Sideways (2004) actor Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers (2023), which celebrated its premiere at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival and screened as a special presentation at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was a runner-up for the TIFF 2023 People’s Choice Award.
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