George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat is an old-fashioned romance that’s also true, and Paul Giamatti delivers an award-worthy performance in The Holdovers.
In those heady days when John Wayne was dispatching hostile “injuns” by the dozen, no one could have envisaged Hollywood making clean-cut white Americans into the bad guys. It would have taken a clairvoyant to predict the tide of identity politics that has swept over the United States in recent times, engendering a new generation of heroic role models that might be female or African American, Asian or Latino.
Joel Edgerton, second from right, is probably the star of The Boys in the Boat, doing his best impersonation of the anxious, grim-faced mentor who hides his human feelings. AP
