Sentimental Value review – Stellan Skarsgård is an egomaniac director in act of ancestor worship

Cannes film festivalJoachim Trier’s entertaining drama sees Norwegian auteur-on-the-slide Skarsgård putting his showbiz family through the wringer in the service of his fading careerHere is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes the marvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate Reinsve, who stars in this one as well. The film cycles through a range of moods and ideas, and finally delivers a fair bit of that sentimentality from the title; it’s a movie of daddy issues and cinematic adventures in the manner of Fellini and Bergman, with a gag about overhearing a therapist’s session through the heating pipes, pinched from Woody Allen’s Another Woman.Stellan Skarsgård plays preening auteur Gustav Borg, whose career is on the slide; many years ago, he left his wife, Sissel, a psychotherapist, and two young daughters, abandoning the family home – the house where Gustav himself was brought up. Now their mother has died and Gustav’s daughter Nora (Reinsve), a famous stage actor starring in a production of A Doll’s House, is suffering anxiety attacks – and to snap out of it, she asks to be slapped backstage by the (married) actor with whom she is having an affair, played by longtime Trier player Anders Danielsen Lie. Continue reading...

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The ‘must-watch’ film of 2025 just received a 19-minute standing ovation at Cannes

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