The Holdovers

This film follows a pompous, rigid and disliked teacher at a New England prep school. He has to remain on campus during the Christmas holidays in 1970, to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, only one student remains, a trouble-making 18 year-old, a good scholar whose bad behaviour threatens to get him expelled. Joining them is the school’s head cook, a woman whose son was recently lost in Vietnam. These three very different people form an unlikely Christmas family sharing comic misadventures. The real story is how they help one another understand that they are not beholden to their past but can choose their own futures.