After running for nearly eight weeks at Film Streams, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers was a smash hit at our theaters and quickly became a holiday classic. The film received five nominations at the 96th Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Paul Giamatti with Da'Vine Joy Randolph winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

A curmudgeonly instructor (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 (Dominic Sessa) -- and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Randolph).

Reviews

"The Holdovers is a consistently smart, funny movie about people who are easy to root for and like the ones we know. Its greatest accomplishment is not how easy it is to see yourself in Paul, Angus, or Mary. It's that you will in all three." – Roger Ebert

"The benefit of the Yuletide setting is that Payne has gifted us a film intended to be watched every year. It feels like finding an unwatched classic under the tree on Christmas morning." – Little White Lies