There’s a scene in The Holdovers in which Paul Giamatti’s cantankerous classics teacher, Mr. Hunham, hobbles out on Christmas morning to buy a tree. It’s a last minute plug to reintroduce festivity unto the emptied out halls of his workplace, the Barton Academy boarding school. Such proves a melancholy sight. A shonky spruce, sparsely decorated, and tilting tiredly to the right. And yet, it’s a gesture of hope too. An image of merriment. In many ways, this weary symbol of seasonal fancy embodies The Holdovers, which ambles into cinemas several weeks late for Christmas. The film reminds of joyful days past, even as a long, bleak winter sets in. Nailed is that happy-sad sweet spot all too often felt in the so-called most wonderful season of all.
Charisma overpowers codswallop in Will Gluck’s Anyone But You, an immensely watchable, if throughly convoluted, bard-stardisation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. It’s a loose take on the sixteenth-century romcom, true, but no more so than were She’s the Man or 10 Things I Hate About You. Boy meets girl. Boy has massive misunderstanding with girl. Boy hates girl…and so on. There’s no confusing this fluff with the Kenneth Branagh adaptation but fans of gorgeous people doing gorgeous things in gorgeous places will find themselves no less thoroughly entertained.
Two decades of narrative reclamation haven’t been kind to Mean Girls. That’s not to withdraw the film’s status as the noughties’ seminal behemoth. The film remains the most instantly quotable of the twenty-first century to date. It’s fetch. And yet, as astute as Mean Girls was in its acerbic assessment of clique culture, the aging process has exposed through lines of misogyny, racism and homophobia. To this end, the 2024 do-over can’t help but feel like contemporary sanitisation. The product of a late night spent pouring over think piece assassinations. It’s fun. It’s well cast. It still doesn’t make fetch happen.
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