The Holdovers is a 2023 comedy-drama film written by David Hemingson and directed by Alexander Payne, whose previous work includes Sideways, Nebraska, and The Descendants. Set at a fictional New England prep school during the winter break of 1970, the film was produced by Focus Features with a deliberate visual and tonal commitment to the cinema of the 1970s — textured film grain, faded color palette, a setting sealed from the modern world by snow and institutional isolation.

The film stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, a cantankerous classics teacher with a wandering eye and no known social life, who is grudgingly assigned to watch over students unable to go home for Christmas. When most of the students are spirited away mid-break, Hunham finds himself trapped with just one student — Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in his feature debut), a brilliant, furious, grieving teenager — and Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the school's head cook carrying her own devastating loss. What unfolds is a three-character study of loneliness, class, grief, and unexpected connection across the frozen holiday weeks.

The Holdovers earned five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor for Giamatti, while Da'Vine Joy Randolph won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — a deeply felt, near-unanimous choice across every awards body that season. Critics celebrated the film's warmth, its refusal to sentimentalize its characters' pain, and its commitment to an older kind of American movie-making that feels both nostalgic and newly necessary. It stands as one of the finest American comedies of the decade.