Movie reviews: 'The Holdovers' is an uplifting tale that avoids the pitfalls of so many other movies about broken people

THE HOLDOVERS: 4 STARS

“The Holdovers,” a new drama starring Paul Giamatti and now playing in theatres, does such a good job of transporting the audience back to when a pint of Jim Bean only set you back $2 and it was still OK to smoke a pipe at a movie theatre, you’ll swear it’s a long-lost artefact from the Nixon era.

The setting is Barton Academy, a New England old-money stopover for wealthy boys on their way to the Ivy League school of their choice. They are the future, or, as Ancient Civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Giamatti) calls them, “entitled little degenerates.”

Universally disliked by staff and students alike, Hunham is by-the-book, the kind of teacher who assigns heavy reading over the Christmas break, with the promise of an exam on the first day back.

“Our one purpose,” he says, “is to produce young men of character.”

Every year there are a handful of students who stay on campus over the two-week Christmas holiday, which means a teacher has to stay behind as chaperone. This year the duty falls to Hunham, who plans an intensive fortnight of studying, physical fitness and discipline for five boys abandoned by their parents.

“You should go easy on them,” says the school’s cook Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

“Oh please,” Hunham snorts. “They’ve had it easy their whole lives.”

When four of the five get a last-minute invite courtesy of a rich dad with a helicopter, the impromptu Breakfast Club is narrowed down to one, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart but troubled young man whose mom chose Christmas break to run off on a honeymoon with her new husband.

As the days pass, and Christmas approaches, the odd couple find common ground, and discover they aren’t as different as they thought.

“The Holdovers” has a fairly simple set-up—a Scroogey character discovers his humanity by making a connection with a younger person, just in time for Christmas—but it’s the film’s warmth, once you scratch through its icy facade, that’ll win you over.

When he is referring to his students as “hormonal vulgarians,” Giamatti is at his curmudgeonly best, but there is more to him than fancy insults (although his put-down, “you are penis cancer in human form” is rather memorable) and walleyed glare. He’s a man deeply damaged by life, who now finds himself waging class warfare on the privileged kids he teaches at what is, essentially, a depository for rich boys.

A man out of time—“The world doesn’t make sense anymore,” he says.—he’s quick to anger, with a bubbling rage roiling just under the surface at all times, and even when he tries to be charming, he comes off as awkward at best. His idea of light, Christmas party conversation? “Aeneas carried mistletoe when he went into Hades,” he says to blank stares.

Giamatti keeps him watchable by making sure to access the character’s brokenness. His bluster is a mask for his heartache, and as he gradually makes connections with Angus and Mary, his defences lower, revealing his true self. It’s a touching, warm and Oscar-worthy performance hidden beneath an inch or two of insolence.

He is ably supported by newcomer Sessa, whose character’s actions lead to emotional growth as he forms an unlikely family as one third of a trio of misfits. It’s a touching performance, part swagger, part shattered, that hints at more great things to come from the young actor.

As Mary, a woman traumatized by the death of her only son in Vietnam, Randolph, who displays her comedic chops on "Only Murders in the Building," brings a poignant edge to the story as the glue that binds this impromptu family together.

“The Holdovers” is a warmhearted coming-of-all-ages movie, but never succumbs to cheap melodrama or saccharine sentimentality. It’s an uplifting tale of, as Armistead Maupin put it, embracing your logical family instead of your biological one, that avoids the pitfalls of so many other movies about broken people.

PRISCILLA: 3 ½ STARS

“Priscilla,” a new film from director Sophia Coppola and now playing in theatres, is a bird in a gilded cage story set against the backdrop of loneliness and rock ‘n roll superstardom.

The story begins in Germany, where 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) lives with her mother Ann (Dagmara Domińczyk) and stepfather Paul (Ari Cohen), a United States Air Force officer stationed at Wiesbaden, West Germany.

Her life is changed forever when, while doing homework at a coffeeshop, she is approached by Terry West (Luke Humphrey), an officer stationed with 24-year-old Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi in full-on “Uh huh huh” mode) in nearby Bad Nauheim.

“You like Elvis Presley?” he asks her.

“Of course,” she says. “Who doesn’t?”

Despite her parent’s reservations, Priscilla accepts West’s invitation to go to a party at Elvis’s home. She meets the "King of Rock ‘n Roll," who, after inviting her to his bedroom, tells her he’s homesick and just wants to talk to talk to somebody “from home.”

Caught up in the fantasy of having Elvis all to herself, Priscilla falls hard.

The chaste romance continues, with some rules from set by Priscilla’s father, until Elvis is transferred back to the States. With no contact from the singer, Priscilla gets the GI Blues, and keeps up with his life through fan magazines that trumpet his love affairs with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Ann-Margret. Her mother encourages her to forget about Elvis, to cast her eyes on the boys at school. “There must be some handsome ones,” she says.

When he finally calls, inviting her to come visit him in Memphis, Priscilla enters a world of fantasy, fame and manipulation.

“Promise me you’ll stay the way you are now,” he says to her. She nods demurely, but of course, people change, even when they’re in love.

Based on Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, the movie is told from her perspective. So, unlike Baz Luhrmann’s recent “Elvis,” there are no concert scenes, no screaming crowds. Instead, we see the flipside of fame, the family hours, the downtown as Priscilla is kept sequestered away at Graceland, a schoolgirl living with an immature superstar, because, as Elvis tells her, “the Colonel thinks it’s better if the fans don’t know about you.” It is a world of wealth and luxury but, also one almost completely devoid of true freedom, happiness or contentment.

In Coppola’s episodic structure, Elvis is portrayed as an insecure, manipulative, toady, easy to anger and emotionally abusive--a man used to calling the shots and getting what he wants. He tells her how to dress, how to behave and demands she be available at all times.

“It’s either me or a career,” he says when she muses about taking a job. “When I call you, I need you to be there.”

As Elvis’ career demands escalate and drug habit worsens, so does Priscilla’s alienation and growing sense of independence.

In a breakout performance, Spaeny, best known for playing a teenage single mother on the Emmy-winning “Mare of Easttown,” goes internal, creating a portrait of Priscilla that relies on what isn’t said as much as what is. It’s the perfect approach to display the loneliness and internal turbulence that characterized her time at Graceland.

The "show, don’t tell" aesthetic of the film isn’t limited to Spaeny’s work. Coppola stages a terrific tableau of Elvis, gun tucked into his belt, taking a photo with a nun, that captures the ridiculous, yet all-encompassing nature of the singer’s fame. More poignant is the image of the eager-to-please Priscilla, slathering on the heavy makeup and long lashes Elvis preferred just before going to the hospital to have a baby.

“Priscilla” is a gentle look at a turbulent time. It is occasionally a bit too on-the-nose in its music choices—for instance, "Crimson and Clover’s” “I don’t hardly know her/But I think I could love her,” is a bit too obvious a soundtrack for their first kiss—but is otherwise a subtle and thoughtful musing on a doomed love affair.

NYAD: 3 ½ STARS

There’s stubborn, and then there’s Diana Nyad, the subject of “NYAD,” a new Netflix movie starring Annette Bening as a marathon swimmer who doesn’t know the meaning of the word quit. Battling against age, weather and expectations, she refuses to give up on her dream of swimming the 108 miles (174 km) from Cuba to Key West through shark and jellyfish infested waters. “I will not accept defeat,” she says.

Based on Nyad’s true story, the movie begins on the eve of her 60th birthday. Thirty years after trading her swimming career for a gig as a correspondent for “Wide World of Sports,” she wants another challenge. “You turn 60 and the world decides you’re a bag of bones,” she says.

Sidestepping the self-described “hurtling toward mediocrity,” she sets her sights on revisiting her failed 1978 long distance swim between Cuba to Key West. At age 29 she swam for 42 hours, covered 76 miles (122 km), but was forced to abort because of weather.

At the time, experts said the swim was “closer to impossible than possible.” Now, with a ragtag team of volunteers, including her best friend/coach/support system Bonnie (Jodie Foster) and navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), she sets off to conquer the "Mount Everest" of swims, no matter how many tries it takes.

“I don’t leave room for imagining defeat,” she declares.

“NYAD” is not exactly a biopic. It focusses on a specific time in Nyad’s life, filling in background details with hallucinatory flashbacks, so it never goes deep. Instead, it succeeds because it is a portrait of the determination required to become a world class athlete and the team that helps along the way.

It’s also the story of platonic love as it examines the friendship between Nyad and Bonnie. Bening and Foster, both terrific, provide the movie’s heart, lending an emotional element that elevates the film’s prevailing, and occasionally overwrought, inspirational message. The third spoke on the wheel is Ifans as the gruff navigator with a heart of gold. His analytical, logical approach provides a nice counterpart to Bonnie’s tough love and Diana’s self-absorption.

The swimming scenes, and there are many of them, are nicely captured by "Top Gun: Maverick" cinematographer Claudio Miranda, whose camera gives the audience a you-are-there look at Diana in action. The vastness of the ocean, the ever-present danger of sharks and venomous box jellyfish coupled with Miranda’s photography amplify the overwhelming odds Nyad is up against.

“NYAD” spends much of its runtime in the water, following Diana as she makes attempt after attempt to achieve her goal, but it isn’t the sport that makes the movie interesting. Like any great sports movie, it’s the people, not the game that is most compelling.

SLY: 3 STARS

“Sly,” a new, reverent Netflix documentary directed by Thom Zimny, is an authorized look at the life of Sylvester Stallone, through the lens of his two best known characters, resilient boxer Rocky Balboa and blunt-force object John Rambo.

The doc begins as Stallone announces he’s moving house, heading east to New York City from his longtime, opulent west coast home in search of a change of scenery and creative rebirth. As a lifetime of memories and memorabilia—the L.A. house has a truly shocking number of statues and figurines of Rocky and Rambo—is packed away, he reminisces about life, his movies and, in one of the film’s few surprises, his love of polo.

Direct and forthright, he turns on the charm to describe his hardscrabble beginnings in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen with parents Frank and Jackie. He spends a great deal of time on his father, a complicated, abusive man who later in life became jealous of his son’s success, but, strangely, almost no time on his mother who was a celebrity in the 1980s.

That’s just one of many omissions. There’s no mention of his softcore movie “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s,” for instance, but “Sly” is not for completists. As Stallone hopscotches through his filmography, focusing on his three successful franchises, “Rocky,” “Rambo” and “The Expendables,” with little or no mention of the other 75 or so films that fill out his resume, it’s clear he has a more high-minded philosophical job to do.

The Oscar-nominated actor, writer, director and producer attempts to find common ground between his personal story of tenacity and his best-known characters. It’s hard to deny the connection between the underdog Rocky and early Sly, or John Rambo’s survival skill set and Stallone’s ability to stay relevant in Hollywood. It’s a bit of a stretch to see how “The Expendables” fits the mold, but this is Stallone’s world and we’re just visiting.

Better than the tangential links between art and artist is a scene featuring Stallone re-listening to a decades-old interview on a battered old cassette tape.

“Rocky,” he says as a young man, “is a character study.”

“No, it’s not,” his contemporary self says. “It’s a love story!”

It’s a nice and rare moment of self-depreciation that compares and contrasts Stallone in different eras; the heady days of early fame and the more self-reflective present day version.

More than anything, the remarkably intimate portrait of the larger-than-life Stallone is a study in star power. As he talks about his life, usually looking directly into the camera, the elusive it-factor that made and kept him a star is self-evident.

“Sly” may not offer up a lot of new material, but does put a personal and entertaining spin on the familiar stories.