The Holdovers (2023)

[Detective Jim McLeod]

This is directed by Alexander Payne, one of my favorite directors. Paul Giamatti is a curmudgeon professor who stuck at the boarding school watching over a student who is not able to go home for Christmas vacation.

I rate it 7/10, a good film but not one of Payne's best. Not as great as Election (1999),About Schmidt (2002) or Sideways (2004).

It gets a bit sentimental, I don't have anything against sentimentality but not in a Payne film. His humor is usually edgy and dark. But this is worth seeing for the acting and the fact it is set in 1970 so the characters are not distracted by cell phones and social media.

[Dargo]

Thanks for the review here, Jim.

[Detective Jim McLeod]

I thought the movie was pretty engaging for the most part, but towards the ending it just started following the beats you expect from this kind of movie, which makes it seem/feel less original and more predictable than you would have expected from what came in the first 2/3rds of the film.

I agree with that, towards the end, it was pretty easy to see where it was going.

The soundtrack is good too, it introduced me to a singer/songwriter named Labi Siffre, from UK. He had dome albums in the early 1970s which were popular in the UK but he never made it in the US. His song "Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying" is great one, it is stuck in my head for the last two days.