10 movies to check out on Prime Video this April

Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama The Holdovers set during Christmas in the early 1970s won Da’Vine Joy Randolph a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as bereaved prep school cafeteria manager Mary Lamb. The official description reads: “The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during the holiday break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).” The A.V. Club’s writes: “Laced with questions about mental health, trauma, privilege, and entitlement that are rightly anchored in its 1970 setting but which ring all the more true in 2023, Payne reaches for a simple imperative to leave us with: let us be gentle with others (and ourselves) lest we build a world where only assholes are allowed to thrive.”