As “All Of Us Strangers” and “Poor Things” are wowing festival audiences, quietly inserting itself into the fray, most subtly, is Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers.”
The film currently has a 78 on Metacritic, based on 6 reviews. It’s also at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 7.9 average score. Not top-tier marks like his past efforts (“Nebraska,” “Sideways”) but it sounds like a decent return to form for Payne.
The film quietly screened at the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend, slightly overshadowed by other more acclaimed films. It’s set to screen at TIFF next week where some are predicting a much more pronounced reception.
It does sound like a semi-comeback for the humanist filmmaker. His last film was 2017’s much-maligned “Downsizing.” Payne described the making of the big-budget film as “difficult on every level — writing, financing, editing.” He added that its “ambitious narrative may have been too much to fit into the framework of a single film.”
“The Holdovers” is currently at #6 in the latest Gold Derby “experts” polling for the Best Picture Oscar. Here’s the official synopsis:
From acclaimed director Alexander Payne, THE HOLDOVERS follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) 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 (newcomer Dominic Sessa) -- and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
Payne has always been one of my favorite American filmmakers, I love his filmography: “Citizen Ruth,” “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” “Nebraska.”
The launch date for “The Holdovers” has been bumped up from November to, now, an October 27, 2023 release. A trailer was released earlier this summer.