By the time Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and Tully (Dominic Sessa) wander through an ancient art museum in Boston, its already achingly apparent that the yearning for connection felt by the pair is an eternal truth. The Roman Empire was made up of people, and people invariably seek out connection. “There is no new human experience” Hunham declares and perhaps he’s right. The Holdovers is set in the winter of 1970 but in reality the ideas it explores are timeless. 

Boys have been sent off to die at war for as long as war has existed and the people left in their wake have always been splintered by loneliness. An early scene sees the graves of a collection of young men killed in World War I and II before expanding out to all the boys of Barton boarding school gathering for the funeral of a young alumnus killed in Vietnam. A long line of carnage that the carefree students step over to get to their winter vacation. Not all of them are so lucky.

Through a handful of thrilling documentary features Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have proven themselves extremely capable filmmakers documenting the extremes of human endurance and determination. Their subjects have frequently been willing to risk their lives in pursuit of the impossible and push their bodies to the absolute limit. In some cases — The Rescue — that pursuit is in service of noble heroics, in others — Free Solo — its a vanity to be remembered by history and seen as the hero. Whatever the reason, Vasarhelyi and Chin have become a singular lens through which to see extreme athletes, making Diana Nyad the perfect subject for their first narrative feature. 

Nyad is best known as an accomplished marathon swimmer, setting a number of records in the 70s for both distance and speed in open ocean swims of as much as 100 miles. Her failed effort to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida loomed over her other accomplishments and at age 61 she began a series of attempts to finally accomplish the feat. An extreme athlete pushing the boundaries of age and physical achievement, if they were making movies back in 2013, Vasarhelyi and Chin might have followed Nyad’s swims with their documentary cameras. Instead she is the muse of their narrative debut.

It’s no secret that Sofia Coppola has made a career out of depicting young women and their “gilded cages.” Its a phrase the director uses herself to describe the often opulent locales in which she traps her protagonist. Be it a grand Tokyo hotel, the palace at Versailles or mansions of Beverley Hills, Coppola uses the trappings of beautiful places to accentuate the loneliness of the young women who inhabit them. While Elvis Presley’s massive estate at Graceland may skew more gaudy that gorgeous, it’s halls turns cavernous for the singer’s young paramour in Priscilla.