Exceedingly cozy. The feeling of waking up early on a winter's morning, gazing out into the falling snow, and sipping some coffee to the sound of a crackling fire, here carefully distilled into cinematic form. Structurally, there's not much to it: Paul Hunham, the ascetic and famously cantankerous civilizations instructor at Barton Academy, is tasked with looking after Angus, the one student with nowhere to go over Christmas break. They eat meals with head cook Mary, attend a party in town, and take a field trip to Boston. Paul considers Angus an entitled brat (and worse, an incurious philistine), Angus considers Paul a miserly crank, and over the course of two weeks they learn to set aside their assumptions, exposing vulnerabilities and sharing with one another their hopes and failures. We've seen this sort of teacher-pupil dynamic before. And yet, the meeting of form and content, the evocation of time and place not just through production design but through the very grammar of the storytelling—the unhurried pacing, considered zooms and pans across Barton's desolate snow-covered environs, and literary approach to characterization—is kind of a marvel. And while it doesn't quite have the acerbic bite of some of Payne's previous work, there's deep frustration and anger bubbling alongside its gentle melancholy. For something so evocative of the 1970s, this is fundamentally about the here and now: legacies of systemic racism and inequality, the unspoken boundaries demarcating one class from another, the asymmetrical traumas of war. Mary's story is peripheral to the dynamic between Paul and Angus, but central to virtually everything else.