‘The Holdovers’ Trailer Reunites Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti

Questions remain how the fall festival and awards season will be affected by the double strike, but that’s not going to stop us from getting excited about promising movies on the horizon like The Holdovers, which reunites Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti almost exactly 20 years after Sideways.

Focus released the first trailer for the 1970s-set dramedy, which centers on Giamatti’s curmudgeonly boarding school teacher Paul Hunham, who is tasked with watching the students left behind by their parents over Christmas break. Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays the school’s head cook while Dominic Sessa plays the troubled student who bonds with the instructor.

A likely festival play (Sideways premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and Downsizing played at the Venice Film Festival), The Holdovers’ trailer is charmingly made in the style of classic 1970s trailer, with even the Focus label redesigned. (The company was founded in 2002, so this is not an authentic vintage design, but who’s counting.)

Payne hasn’t directed a film since 2017’s Downsizing, which was met with tepid reception from critics and audiences. But he’s been nominated for the best-director Oscar for three of his films (Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska), and has won best adapted screenplay twice, for Sideways and The Descendants. Here’s hoping The Holdovers is a return to form—and that, whatever happens to festival season as the SAG strike continues, audiences are able to see it in its proper, theatrical form.