The Holdovers (2023) dir. by Alexander Payne

The Holdovers is a film about people who have gone through a great deal of trauma, and who decide to isolate themselves from the people around them to deal with it.

It follows Mr Hunham, a cynical, bitter teacher at Barton, a New England boarding school for rich kids, stuck babysitting the kids left behind over Christmas break — the “holdovers”; Mary, a cook at the school whose late son was a scholarship student there; and Angus, an angsty, angry teen who had his holiday plans unexpectedly changed at the last minute.

From the second the screen lit up with imagery of The Holdovers‘ New England setting, my eyes were glued. The colours here are so, so beautiful. I can’t help but make a comparison to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn; there, the colours were bright and vibrant, with an intentionally garish film treatment meant to emulate the excesses of the 1990s and 2000s. In The Holdovers, the colours are, like its 1970s setting, much more muted, but just as rich with warmth. Grab a few stills from it and I could honestly mistake it for a film released alongside The Breakfast Club because of just how well it evokes that feel.

I said out loud during the opening sequence: “Snow is so fucking depressing”, and my girlfriend shot back with “Yeah, because you got used to it.” That feels intentional in this film. The snow often frames the characters as solitary, hedging them small within the frame. On the flip side, the snow is also beautiful. It’s quiet, and peaceful in its its washed-out warm white. When they’re together, the snow no longer looks like it engulfs them; it floats around them while they walk through it.

The colours here really do pull everything together so well. It’s a big part of why I got sucked into its emotional reality, one drenched in earnestness and emotional warmth that’s more often than not nowadays painted over by irony, to avoid being too corny.

Maybe I’m projecting. In the past, I’d find myself acting like a slightly less annoying version of Angus and Mr Hunham — they deflect moments of real emotion and vulnerability with self-deprecation and lashing out. Yet, even though the film depicts them doing these, it still has an immense amount of tenderness towards them. the camera lingers on them in these moments, forcing them into vulnerability by baring them plainly to us, the audience. Then the camera lingers on the people who are there with them and we see that they, just like us, recognise this vulnerability. The film doesn’t let them get away with trying to deflect their emotions, it embraces them in warmth.

Saltburn (2023) dir. by Emerald Fennell

The prettiest B-movie I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. It’s not the examination of class or greed that I expected to see. No, Saltburn isn’t cutting enough to be satire, not clear enough to be political, too blunt to be layered.

Doesn’t matter though. Saltburn is Gen Z ‘vibes-only’ filmmaking through and through. It’s great to look at, got good-to-great performances (Barry Keoghan, hello), and pulls it all together really well. Its biggest failing is when it tries to have its The Handmaiden moment — everything up to that point had been too obvious to be shocking, and it felt like the film was suddenly stretching a bit too far, trying to do plotwhen it was previously excelling at just doing vibes.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) dir. by Martin Scorsese

You know when someone’s just, like, a living legend and everything they make is critically-acclaimed? And they’re always thought of as “that excellent person”, so much so that it becomes kind of a given and people stop really thinking about how good they are? That’s kind of how I felt about Martin Scorsese, and this film really took me by the shoulders and shook me back awake because my God what an immense reminder of what a film by a great filmmaker looks like.

The story here is so expansive and wide, taking up nearly 3.5 hours of screentime, but it never feels superfluous. In fact, it’s staggeringly concise in spite of how long the film is. The cut to Ernest’s first robbery in Fairfax, for example, happens so quickly in contrast to the scenes that come before it, but paints exactly who he is so efficiently. Killers is full of these moments, where it manages to squeeze so much context and backstory and motivation out of its story, that you end up wondering how it’s going to fill its remaining time. Miraculously, it does; and when it finally does slow down in its quieter moments, they hit so much more.