Our Academy Award coverage continues with Alexander Payne's "The Holdovers," starring Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. In a film that harkens back to our first episode - Dead Poets Society - Giamatti delivers a heart-wrenching performance as the enigmatic professor Paul Hunham, a black sheep, misanthropic teacher at Barton Academy, his own alma mater. After drawing the short straw and being made to stay behind and look after the students with no place to go for the holidays, Hunham is forced to thaw his icy heart a bit and find a way to perhaps put one young man (Sessa) on a path to a better, less bitter and lonely path than the one Hunham himself has had to lead.
