Movie Reviews
'The Holdovers': A predictable letdown of a film – review
Alexander Payne’s latest movie, The Holdovers, which opens throughout Israel on February 8, is getting major Oscar buzz and it’s the kind of character-driven, low-key drama of redemption and friendship that could provide a nice contrast to the overblown, overhyped movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer that got most of the attention this year.
If only it were better.
It’s one of those wintry movies about misfits bonding during the Christmas season, and while it has characters you care about more as it goes along, it takes its time and it’s so clear that the bonding is on the way that you may grow impatient with the slow pacing. It’s disappointing because Payne has often made enjoyable, memorable movies, especially his early features, Election and Citizen Ruth.
Why The Holdovers falls flat
Election brutally satirized a high-school student (Reese Witherspoon) determined to win a school election at all costs, while Citizen Ruth, featuring Laura Dern, subversively mined the politics of the political controversy around the abortion movement for comedy. Payne also made Sideways, the story of two middle-aged men who are disappointed with their lives and who take what they hope will be a cathartic journey through California wine country, which was a breakout role for Paul Giamatti, best known today for the TV series, Billions, who also stars in The Holdovers.
In The Holdovers, Giamatti – considered one of the frontrunners for the Best Actor Oscar – plays Paul Hunham, a very strict teacher at a New England boys’ prep school in 1970 who is universally disliked and disrespected by the students, the other teachers, and his boss. He revels in giving his students – most of whom he considers lazy, overprivileged idiots – failing grades, even if they are wealthy or politically connected. No one would ever consider Paul overprivileged. He was a scholarship student, went to Harvard, and came back to teach at his old prep school – and rarely leaves the campus. He has no family, no friends, and no relationships with women. Oh, and due to a medical condition, he smells bad. Before you can think what a lovable loser he is, he gets stuck looking after “the holdovers” – the kids who can’t go home for the holidays – over the Christmas break.
It goes without saying that he is an unrelenting jerk as he makes these sad students, who are missing their families (some live far away, some have parents who don’t want them around), spend their days studying and exercising, with no chance for any fun. It’s all about painting Paul – at the beginning – as what the late New Yorker critic Pauline Kael would have called “a parody of an anti-life monster,” a quote from her review of Terms of Endearment, in which she was describing Shirley MacLaine’s character, but which also applies here.
Eventually, all the students get a reprieve and are able to leave, except for Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, who should have gotten an Oscar nod but didn’t). He is Paul’s brightest student and though he originally seemed like one of the entitled egomaniacs Paul loathes, at the last minute, his mother tells him that she and his new stepfather are going to the Caribbean for a vacation without him. This punctures Angus’s brash façade and while he rebels against Paul’s rules, it’s clear that he is acting out due to his feelings of abandonment.
There is a third character who is stuck at the school with them, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who is virtually guaranteed an Oscar for this performance), the school cook who is mourning the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam. She is wise and noble throughout, with moments of heartbreaking vulnerability. Randolph, who has appeared in The Idol and Only Murders in the Building, plays this role so well you will only realize how cliched the character is after you leave the theater. Despite her pain, she manages to push Paul and Angus closer together, making them realize what is truly important in life.
Eventually, the long-foreshadowed bonding comes as the teacher and student reveal their secrets and admit who they really are, in a series of scenes that do become progressively more touching. Mary finds some comfort in her connection to the two of them and they all embrace the redemption that was hovering on the horizon from the movie’s opening moments.
The three leads work well together and you will root for them, although there is a predictability and heavy-handedness to the story that makes it less moving than it would otherwise be. There are some good actors in supporting roles who don’t have much to do, among them Carrie Preston of The Good Wife who plays a down-to-earth faculty member who moonlights as a waitress. The ’70s setting is used cleverly and the opening credits make it look like a film that was actually made 50-plus years ago, which is a fun way to start it off.
But for all its virtues, The Holdovers invites unfortunate comparisons to the ne plus ultra of teacher-student bonding movies, Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire, based on and very faithful to the great novel by Michael Chabon of the same title. While I really wanted to like The Holdovers and I did enjoy quite a bit of it, it was hard to banish memories from the much funnier and more moving Wonder Boys as The Holdovers limped along.
PopHorror had the chance to check out Anacoreta (2022) ahead of its streaming release! Does this meta-horror flick provide interesting story telling or is it a confusing mess.
Let’s have a look…
Synopsis
A group of friends heads to a secluded woodland cabin for a weekend getaway, planning to film an experimental horror movie. As the shoot progresses, the project begins to fall apart—until a real and terrifying presence emerges from the darkness.
Anacoreta is directed by Jeremy Schuetze. It was written by Jeremy Schuetze and Matt Visser. The film stars Antonia Thomas (Bagman 2024), Jesse Stanley (Raf 2019), Jeremy Schuetze (Jennifer’s Body 2009), and Matt Visser (A Lot Like Christmas 2021)
My Thoughts
Antonia Thomas delivered an outstanding performance as the female lead in Anacoreta. It was remarkable to watch her convey such a wide range of emotions with authenticity and depth. I was continually impressed by her ability to switch seamlessly between different dialects. I absolutely loved her delivery of the dialogue of telling The Scorpion and the Frog fable.
Anacoreta employs a distinctive, meta-horror style of storytelling. The narrative follows a group of friends creating a “scripted reality” horror film, and as the plot unfolds, the boundary between their staged production and their actual lives becomes increasingly blurred. This was interesting, but at the same time frustrating as a viewer.
Check out Anacoreta on Prime Video and let us know your thoughts!
“So it’s like Avatar?” one character quips in Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers,” bluntly translating the film’s high-concept premise for the sugar-fueled kids in the audience. And yes, the comparison is apt. The story follows a nature-obsessed teenage girl who manages to quite literally “hop” her consciousness into the body of a robotic beaver in order to spark an animal rebellion against a greedy mayor determined to bulldoze their forest for a freeway.
It’s a clever hook. The kind of big, elastic idea Pixar used to make look effortless. “Hoppers” does not reach the rarified air of “Up,” “Wall-E,” or “Inside Out,” but after a stretch of uneven originals like “Turning Red” and “Luca,” and outright misfires such as “Elemental” and “Elio,” this feels like a genuine course correction. The environmental messaging is clear without being preachy, the animals are irresistibly anthropomorphized, and the studio’s once-signature emotional sincerity is back in sturdy form.
Pixar can afford to gamble on originals when it has a guaranteed cash cow like this summer’s “Toy Story 5” waiting in the wings, but “Hoppers” earns its place in the catalogue. Director Daniel Chong crafts a warm, heartfelt film that occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, yet remains grounded by character and theme. Its meditation on conservation and animal displacement feels timely in a way that never tips into after-school-special territory.
We meet Mabel, voiced with bright conviction by Piper Curda, as a child liberating her classroom pets and returning them to the wild. Her moral compass is shaped by her grandmother, voiced by Karen Huie, who imparts wisdom about nature’s sanctity. True to both Pixar tradition and the broader Disney playbook, this beacon of guidance does not survive past the opening act. Loss, after all, is Pixar’s favorite inciting incident.
Years later, Mabel is still fighting the good fight, squaring off against the smarmy Mayor Jerry, voiced with slick menace by Jon Hamm. He plans to flatten the glade where Mabel and her grandmother once found solace. Mabel’s resistance feels noble but futile. The animals have already mysteriously vanished, the machinery is coming, and her last-ditch plan involves luring a beaver back to the abandoned forest in hopes of jumpstarting the ecosystem.
That’s when the film gleefully pivots into mad-scientist territory. At Beaverton University, Mabel discovers her professor, voiced by Kathy Najimy, has developed a device that can project human consciousness into synthetic animals. The process, dubbed “hopping,” allows Mabel to inhabit a robotic beaver and infiltrate the forest from within. It’s an inspired escalation that keeps the film buoyant even when the plotting grows predictable.
Her new posse includes King George, a lovably beaver voiced by Bobby Moynihan with distinct Bing Bong energy; a sharp-tongued bear voiced by Melissa Villaseñor; a regal bird king voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock Jr.; and a fish queen voiced by Ego Nwodim. As is often the case with Pixar, even in its lesser efforts, the world-building is meticulous. The animal hierarchy, complete with titles like “paw of the king,” is layered with jokes that play for kids while slyly winking at adults.
The plot ultimately follows a familiar template. Scrappy underdog rallies community. Corporate villain twirls metaphorical mustache. Emotional third-act sacrifice looms. At times, you can feel the machinery working a little too cleanly. Pixar, and Disney at large, has grown increasingly reliant on sequels and established IP, and “Hoppers” does not radically reinvent the wheel. In an animated landscape where films like “K-Pop: Demon Hunters,” “Across the Spider-Verse,” and “Goat” are pushing stylistic and narrative boundaries, being safe and sturdy may not always be enough.
And yet, there is something refreshing about a Pixar original that remembers how to tug at the heart without squeezing it dry. “Hoppers” is playful, peppered with cheeky needle drops, and builds to a sweet emotional catharsis that may or may not have left this critic a little misty-eyed. It feels earnest and engaged.
“Hoppers” may not be top-tier Pixar. But it is a welcome return to form, a reminder that the studio still knows how to marry big ideas with a bigger heart.
HOPPERS opens in theaters Friday, March 6th.
Just when you think Pixar’s petting-zoo cute new movie “Hoppers” is flagrantly ripping off James Cameron, the characters come clean.
movie review
HOPPERS
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG (action/peril, some scary images and mild language). In theaters March 6.
“You guys, this is like ‘Avatar’!,” squeals 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), the studio’s rare college-age heroine.
Shoots back her nutty professor, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Kajimy): “This is nothing like ‘Avatar!’”
Sorry, Doc, it definitely is. And that’s fine. Placing the smart sci-fi story atop an animated family film feels right for Pixar, which has long fused the technological, the fantastical and the natural into a warm signature blend. Also, come on, “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” via “E.T.”
What separates “Hoppers” from the pack of recent Pix flix, which have been wholesome as a church bake sale, is its comic irreverence.
Director Daniel Chong’s original movie is terribly funny, and often in an unfamiliar, warped way for the cerebral and mushy studio. For example, I’ve never witnessed so many speaking characters be killed off in a Pixar movie — and laughed heartily at their offings to boot.
What’s the parallel to Pandora? Mabel, a budding environmental activist, has stumbled on a secret laboratory where her kooky teachers can beam their minds into realistic robot animals in order to study them. They call the devices “hoppers.”
Bold and fiery Mabel — PETA, but palatable — sees an opportunity.
The mayor of Beaverton, Jerry (Jon Hamm), plans to destroy her beloved local pond that’s teeming with wildlife to build an expressway. And the only thing stopping the egomaniacal pol — a more upbeat version of President Business from “The Lego Movie” — is the water’s critters, who have all mysteriously disappeared.
So, Mabel avatars into beaver-bot, and sets off in search of the lost creatures to discover why they’ve left.
From there, the movie written by Jesse Andrews (“Luca”) toys with “Toy Story.” Here’s what mischief fuzzy mammals, birds, reptiles and insects get up to when humans aren’t snooping around. Dance aerobics, it turns out.
Per the usual, “Hoppers” goes deep inside their intricate society. The beasts have a formal political system of antagonistic “Game of Thrones”-like royal houses. The most menacing are the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep — I’d call her a chameleon, but she’s playing a bug), a staunch monarch butterfly and her conniving caterpillar kid (Dave Franco). They’re scheming for power.
Perfectly content with his station is Mabel’s new best furry friend King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gullible beaver who ascended to the throne unexpectedly. He happily enforces “pond rules,” such as, “When you gotta eat, eat.”
That means predators have free rein to nosh on prey, and everybody’s cool with it. Because of bone-dry deliveries, like exhausted office drones, the four-legged cast members are hilarious as they go about their Animal Planet activities.
No surprise — talking lizards, sharks, bears, geese and frogs are the real stars here. They far outshine Mabel, even when she dons beaver attire. Much like a 19-year-old in a job interview, she doesn’t leave much of an impression.
Yes, the teen has a heartfelt motivation: The embattled pond was her late grandma’s favorite place. Mabel promised her that she’d protect it.
But in personality she doesn’t rank as one of Pixar’s most engaging leads, perhaps because she’s past voting age. Mabel is nestled in a nebulous phase between teenage rebellion and adulthood that’s pretty blasé, even if a touch of tension comes from her hiding her Homo sapien identity from her new diminutive pals. When animated, kids make better adventurers, plain and simple.
“Hoppers” continues Pixar’s run of humble, charming originals (“Luca,” “Elio”) in between billion-dollar-grossing, idea-starved sequels (“Inside Out 2,” probably “Toy Story 5”). The Disney-owned studio’s days of irrepressible innovation and unmatched imagination are well behind it. No one’s awed by anything anymore. “Coco,” almost 10 years ago, was their last new property to wow on the scale of peak Pixar.
Look, the new movie is likable and has a brain, heart and ample laughs. That’s more than I can say for most family fare. “A Minecraft Movie” made me wanna hop right out of the theater.
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