The Holdovers

Paul Giamatti plays a classics instructor so comprehensively disliked by his students that being assigned to supervise the handful left behind over Christmas break reads less as punishment than confirmation. Alexander Payne builds the film as a three-character chamber piece set against the snowbound quiet of a New England prep school — a curmudgeon, a sharp and directionless teenager, and a cook newly bereaved by Vietnam, each stranded in their own way. The comedy and the grief are kept in the same register throughout, neither subordinated to the other, and the film's method is essentially to let proximity do the dramatic work.