SENTIMENTAL VALUE, Joachim Trier (2025) / Seeking the love no one else can give

NOTE TO FIRST-TIMERS: This event is not a screening of the film. This event is our regular Saturday night group Zoom conversation on the film, after you've streamed or rented and watched it on your own during the week. Check out the HOW THIS WORKS section below. We look forward to having you join us!

ABOUT THE FILM
Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star. Suddenly, the two sisters must navigate their complicated relationship with their father — and deal with an American star dropped right into the middle of their complex family dynamics.

Directed by Joachim Trier
Written by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Produced by Maria Ekerhovd and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar
Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning
Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen
Edited by Olivier Bugge Coutte
Music by Hania Rani
Release date: 21 May 2025 (Cannes), August-December 2025 worldwide
Running time: 2h 13m

HOW THIS WORKS
Rent or stream Sentimental Value and view it during the week. (Find out where to do that at TV.Movie.) Give us your RSVP, then join our conversation this Saturday 4/4 at 7:20p. A Zoom link will appear on the upper right of this page once you RSVP. First-timers must sign up by Friday 4/3 in order to ensure being admitted.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb1sSfWb1Og

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 95% of 245 reviews
Metacritic 86 (universal acclaim) based on 45 reviews, "Must See"

Sentimental Value garnered nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and one for each of the four principal actors. It won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, the first Norwegian movie ever to gain that honor.

At its premiere screening at Cannes, Sentimental Value received a 19-minute standing ovation, the third longest in the Festival's history.

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible. ∞ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Reinsve, with that phenomenally open oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield. ∞ Alison Willmore, New York Magazine (Vulture)

A meticulous craftsman, Trier seems incapable of making an ugly image, though it’s his restless engagement with the medium’s plasticity — especially with how movies can translate the seemingly ineffable into concrete sights and sounds — that makes his work exciting. There’s a searching quality to his filmmaking, a restiveness that’s shared by his memorably unsettled characters .... Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while Sentimental Value has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy .... Trier remains blissfully attuned to the absurdity of life, a sensitivity that he uses to help attenuate the crushing sadness that few directors with an eye on the box office dare to risk. He’s very good at wowing you with film form, but it’s the deep feeling in his work that is transcendent. ∞ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Ultimately, overlapping notions of family, cinema and healing are neatly tied up in an arresting and heartrendingly gentle finale that will leave an ache in your chest. Stripping dialogue and editing flourishes away, Sentimental Value’s final note is a showstopper. ∞ Emily Maskell, Empire

Skarsgård is the best he’s been in years as a father fundamentally unable to articulate himself in any way other than his work, and oblivious as to why his daughters feel such frustration with him for a lifetime of distance, and there’s keen wisdom in Sentimental Value’s observation of the gulf between who our parents are and who we wish they were. ∞ Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours. ∞ David Fear, Rolling Stone

The characters are so fleshed-out, the diction so lived-in, the backstories and present stories so engaging. Their conversations seem less like scripted scenes than real moments lucky to have been captured. In creating a relatively small and recognizable film that can feel revelatory, Trier shows sleight of hand that could only belong to a young veteran at the height of his career. ∞ Luke Hicks, Film Stage