The Holdovers (scored by Mark Orton) and The Bikeriders (music supervised by Bruce Gilbert and Lauren Mikus) premiered at last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.
The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne, follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a prestigious American school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas 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 Holdovers will screen in select theaters October 27th, followed by a wide release on November 10th.
Deadline calls the film “movie magic”, and “ funny, sad, witty, poignant, filled with snark and heart and great acting”, with “Mark Orton’s wonderful music score setting the tone with a Fred Karlin-ish vibe that seems perfect for the snowy story set at Barton Academy”
The Bikeriders was the festival opener. Directed by Jeff Nichols, the film tells a fictional story inspired by the 1967 photo-book of the same name by Danny Lyon and stars an ensemble cast that includes Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, and Norman Reedus. The film will be released by 20th Century Studios in theaters on December 1st.
Lauren and Bruce are praised by The Hollywood Reporter for their song selection being “thoroughly in sync with the evocative visuals of Ohio and Kentucky locations.”The Los Angeles Times described the film as “elegy to American masculinity, a rumination on the search for identity”, and Entertainment Weekly applauded Nichols for “assembling an estimable ensemble, and they bring to life the antics and erratic violence of their characters with great authenticity”.