Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon is the most popular movie or TV show across all streaming platforms this week — a huge victory for Apple TV Plus.In the latest Reelgood.com streaming rankings, the Apple TV Plus Original sits atop the top 10 most-watched titles across all streaming platforms. Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic was recently nominated for “Best Picture” as well as nine other Academy Awards, making it one of Apple’s most critically acclaimed movies yet.Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of…

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. The 2024 Academy Awards nominees have been announced, which means it’s time to make some popcorn and get to streaming every nominee before the big night. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer leads the pack this year with a whopping 13 nominations, including acting nods for Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt. Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon are the…

A cantankerous, unpopular teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti); a bright, abrasive student, Angus (Dominic Sessa); and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a recently bereaved mother, find themselves forced to spend the winter holiday together in an otherwise empty New England elite academy in Alexander Payne’s terrific, bittersweet throwback to the classic American cinema of the 1970s. It’s Payne’s finest film since Sideways (2004), and like it features a superb Giamatti performance as a stubbornly…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeMr Hunham, the worn-down, middle-aged teacher played with such consummate brilliance by Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers – which has just hit UK cinemas – finds the world a bitter and complicated place. He is an unsympathetic figure despised and feared by the teenagers under his tutelage at Barton Academy, an elite but stuffy boarding school in New England. He…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeIt’s bad business to have released Alexander Payne’s mournful holiday comedy, The Holdovers, several weeks after Christmas has ended. It’s not only a film about the season, but about its vivid, fleeting emotions – a Hallmark card vision of snowy, Seventies New England gives way to the loneliness of feeling moored in your own familiar comforts.Payne’s return behind the camera follows…

The year’s best Christmas movie arrives in the UK a bit late for Christmas: it is a genial, gentle, redemptive dramedy from Alexander Payne which hits the happy/sad sweet spot with Payne’s sure aim. It is taken from TV writer David Hemingson’s impeccably crafted screenplay, a masterclass in incremental, indirect character revelations and plot transitions. The Holdovers is set in 1970, consciously (or maybe self-consciously) crafted to look like a film which its characters could have gone to see at the time, with the…

Dominic Sessa wasn’t thinking about the movies when he entered his senior year of high school at Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts. The original plan was hockey – Sessa, a scholarship student from southern New Jersey, knew that New England prep schools are a launchpad for college careers. But a broken femur and the school’s winter activity requirement landed him in theatre, which he took to like a fish to water. So, new plan: maybe drama school. But in autumn 2021, when Sessa was starring in a student production…

At his home in Catalonia, Spain, last year, Labi Siffre received the latest in a series of requests to use one of his songs in a soundtrack. Based on a synopsis of the movie, set in a boarding school in New England, the singer-songwriter signed off. “The storyline was quite nice, and I thought, ‘Yeah, okay,’” he says. “And that’s all I remembered of it. You move on with the rest of the work you are doing.” But a few weeks ago, the British musician heard from one of his followers on social media that the movie was,…

A key music choice can really make a movie scene sing, for lack of a better word — whether it be a surprising needle drop, a song to underscore a character’s motivation or even a opening credit track that sets the tone of a film. Four directors from this season’s biggest contenders spoke with THR about the tunes they selected for their films, some of which represent the time in which the films are set or, in one case, gives a sense of a character who is notably absent from most of the feature.…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freePaul Giamatti has proved that he’s Hollywood’s most relatable star by following his Golden Globes win with a trip to a popular fast food establishment.The actor, 56, attended the awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday (7 January), where he took home the trophy for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical for Alexander Payne film The Holdovers.Find the full list of Golden…