Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti Reunite in First Trailer for ‘The Holdovers’

Focus Features has released the first trailer for The Holdovers, from two-time Academy Award-winning director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) and starring Academy Award nominee Paul Giamatti, reuniting for the first time since 2004’s Sideways.

The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly instructor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually he forms an unlikely bond with 15-year-old Angus – a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) – and with the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son was recently lost in Vietnam.

Told in the style of a gritty, 1970s/80s era trailer (with a fictional old Focus Features logo), the film is written by David Hemingson and produced by Mark Johnson, Bill Block, and David Hemingson. It is executive produced by Andrew Golov, Thom Zadra, and Chris Stinson.

Focus Features will release The Holdovers in select New York and Los Angeles theaters on October 27, limited release on November 3 and wide on November 10. Here is the trailer.

Photo: Seacia Pavao/Focus Features

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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