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The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I'm an enduringly proud founding member...

...has announced its 2023 Award winners and Top Ten list. As always, some of the selections represent my voting--I'm especially glad my colleagues agreed with me about Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers--others do not, but there's a lot of good acting and moviemaking represented on this list.

While I'm on the subject, I think the PFCS Awards need a name. The Pheenies? The Nixies? The Dry Heaties? Just spitballing...

I'll post my own Top Ten list after the New Year. Happy Holidays everybody!

(CHRISTMAS) BREAK MASTER

Opening this weekend:

The Holdovers--Nobody does bitterness like Paul Giamatti. From his earliest noticeable roles, as "Pig Vomit" in the Howard Stern movie Private Parts or as a pit bull owner on Homicide: Life on the Streets, he made his mark as a vessel of bristling, eye-bugging, impotent rage, and this has carried over into his best lead roles, in American Splendor or Sideways, or even in his miniseries as John Adams.

His seething high dudgeon generally is played for comedy, but even then this great actor brings it a stinging, near-tragic undercurrent; he makes his pained ineffectuality moving. With this latest from Sideways director Alexander Payne, Giamatti gets another vehicle for splenetic, barely-contained fury and defeated disgust. It's one of his best.

The time is 1970; the setting is a blueblood boys' school in Massachusetts. Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a brilliant, exacting Ancient History teacher. Paul is single and friendless in his personal life; in class he brims with acerbic, sarcastic contempt for his lunkheaded, entitled rich-kid students.

On the eve of Christmas break, Paul gets stuck with a miserable detail: supervising the "holdovers," the handful of students stranded on campus with nowhere to go for the holiday. Perhaps the unhappiest of this unhappy lot is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright kid with a troubled past whose Mom has excluded him from her holiday plans with her new husband. Paul's only adult ally is Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager and chef, who's in mourning for her son, recently lost in Vietnam.

It likely won't astonish you to learn that as this little group clash, and then get to know each other and their backstories better, bonding and compassion start to develop between them. Working from a script by David Hemingson, Payne shades this process carefully, generating genuine and plausible warmth without slipping into holiday-movie sentiment. Not only is the film set in 1970, Payne seems to be trying for the modest, unassuming style of a Hal Ashby or James Bridges flick of that period, right down to the opening rating card and production company logos (even the movie's trailer was crafted as a throwback to this time).

The Holdovers is perhaps a bit on the poky side; little in the story gives much urgency to the pace. But the actors bring their connections to life. Giamatti's initial bile is highly entertaining and his gradually rising empathy is touching. Tall and tousle-haired, with a look of stricken perplexity on his handsome features, Sessa has a pleasing, callow awkwardness as Angus. Carrie Preston gives the movie a lift in each of her couple of scenes as a sunny-natured school administrator. And as Mary, Randolph steers around any hint of overt pathos, and as a result makes the character heroic.

JUNGLE ALL THE WAY

Opening in theaters this weekend:

The Lost City--In old movies, lost cities and worlds and civilizations were often destroyed by a volcano at the end, as the explorers just barely escaped. It was as if, in the tradition of such storytelling, once westerners had laid eyes on an exotic unknown place, its destiny was fulfilled and it had no need to carry on existing.

This new adventure comedy, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, is so old-school that it employs the venerable volcano device. Here, at least, it doesn't come out of left field, but is integrated into the plot; Bullock plays Loretta, a romance novelist who has been kidnapped and taken to a tropical island by a rich nutcase (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes she has the archeological translation skills to help him locate a treasure in a lost city he's unearthed. A nearby volcano, about to erupt, provides the urgency.

Tatum plays Loretta's cover model Alan, who engages a cool ex-Navy Seal mercenary (Brad Pitt) to rescue her, and tags along. Soon enough it's just Loretta and Alan, bumbling through the jungle on their own, struggling to elude the rich guy's goons. And, of course, bickering.

Directed by the brothers Aaron and Adam Yee from a script by a gaggle including Seth Gordon, Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, this film's pilferage goes beyond the volcano bit; it draws, directly or indirectly, on everything from Romancing the Stone to the Hope-Crosby Road pictures. It isn't necessarily all that much dumber than any of those movies; nonetheless it's pretty dumb.

Even so, it sort of works. Bits of the dialogue show flashes of wit, and Brad Pitt, employed to send up the sort of hypercompetent man of action that only exists in the movies, probably constitutes the flick's best joke, although the filmmakers can't resist spoiling it at the very end.

Above all, Bullock never sucks. She's been a movie star for three decades now, and she knows what she's doing; she can be silly without going shrill or cartoonish, and can modulate seamlessly from broad schtick to sweet, delicate moments. Even when a movie serves her poorly, she's consistently good company, and Tatum, with his amiable, logy-minded delivery, pairs well with her. It's also refreshing that, for a change, the leading lady is more than a decade and a half older than her love interest.