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I’m not sure you’ll put “The Holdovers” into your regular Christmas movie rotation — but you absolutely should.

The eighth film by “Sideways” director Alexander Payne, “The Holdovers” spends its time with lonely souls spending an unhappy Christmas together at a boy’s boarding school.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a gruff, unpopular history teacher; loathed by his students and mocked by his colleagues, he’s been tasked with monitoring the few students unable to travel home for winter break. Most of those students end up whisked away by a schoolmate’s rich father; after a few days, disenchanted intellectual Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is the only minor left on campus. Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a grieving mother and the school’s chef, is the only other staff member left behind.

No one actually utters the phrase “island of misfit toys,” but it is certainly implied.

Inevitably, the trio becomes something of a makeshift family, bonding over their bleak holiday and gradually revealing bits of themselves. Moreover, the pressures of the season and the isolation of the setting require the central characters to understand one another more fully. Hunham, a no-nonsense instructor, must acknowledge that there may be reasons behind Tully’s rebelliousness; Tully must consider the sad humanity between Hunham’s patrician facade; both must grapple with the real pain in Lamb’s loss.

The sad, somewhat awkward aging man has become a Payne staple; Giamatti played a younger, but nevertheless graying, oenophile in “Sideways,” and Bruce Dern was Oscar nominated for shuffling across the country in “Nebraska.” As central as Hunham is to this story, however, his co-stars are the heart and soul of the film; Tully, embodying the fury and wanderlust of late adolescence, is the soul, and Lamb, diving into a bottomless well of compassion in spite of her crippling grief, is the heart.

It makes for a more complete film than many of Payne’s works; we are not left only with a middle-aged cypher to follow, but given a range of human experiences to consider.

All three characters are performed perfectly. Giamatti brings wit and dignity to a character that might have been played as a buffoon; his humanity is searing. Sessa, a current student at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, is an intellect wrapped in rage. And Randolph is the best of the three, giving a performance that should be studied; she is as heartbreaking as she is inspiring.

If there’s a hint of ironic distance in “The Holdovers” — an unfortunate hallmark of Payne’s work — it is neatly brushed aside by these performers. It’s a very good film, and the best kind of Christmas movie: One that encourages us to look plainly at the life we have, not pine after the holidays we miss.

My Rating: 9/10

“The Holdovers” will serve as the opening-night feature of the Three Rivers Film Festival at the Pittsburgh Playhouse on Nov. 8 before opening in Pittsburgh-area theaters on Nov. 10.