The Lemon Fool

I have seen more good films this year than the whole of last year. Saw it was showing in our local cinema and by sheer fluke it's streaming through Peacock(not sure if UK have this but worth seeing when it comes your way)

Forced to spend Christmas break at his prep school, a cantankerous teacher has an unlikely bond with a troubled student and the head cook.

Slow, calm, obvious where it's going and where it could end. Not a lot happens. Boring possibly? 2 hours plus, so few cast?

Absolutely loved it. Brings back several memories of various prep school type films all rolled into one. Acting, editing, pacing, humour, passion, timeless. Would I watch it again. No. Don't need to, as it will stay in my memory for a while. And yet, this is what the LA Times(who?) had to say....

For all this, “The Holdovers” has been hailed by many as vintage Payne, a welcome comeback after the critical and commercial disappointment of his 2017 science-fiction curio, “Downsizing.” But that movie, for all its missteps, looks increasingly like the noblest of failures, a genuinely nervy, conceptually ambitious folly from which the director has now retreated to this movie’s safer, smugger climes. “The Holdovers” means to send you out of the theater exuding holiday cheer and possibly some renewed faith in humanity, but all that lingers, really, is an overpowering whiff of self-satisfaction. It reeks — not of fish, but of insincerity.

And then there is this from

The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/j ... sweet-spot



However, I would not pay good money to see this, but don't go to the cinema any more anyway. Nice film. End of.

My wife made me watch this but it was entertaining and better than I thought. A "quiet movie" as the term goes, but good enough.

Add to the list of decent movies about posh/preppy schools (If and History Boys) which invariably hit me in the gut, having attended one myself.

I thought this was a delightful film, the sort of film that I thought had been abandoned many years ago. It combined genuinely witty dialogue, warmth and a good story quite brilliantly, and the fact that it was set in 1970, when I was about the same age as the character Angus Tully, was a considerable bonus.

A great soundtrack made it one of the most enjoyable films I've seen in a long time. Highly recommended.

Incidentally, we watched it at the Curzon cinema in Mayfair. It's the first time I've been there for several decades, but I was pleased to see that it hardly seemed to have changed, the perfect setting for a film set in 1970.

Sadly, I believe it's likely to be replaced by some hideous `watch 'n' eat' scheme devised by vile developers - https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ ... 27203.html