Author: Caillou Pettis

The Running Man: The BRWC Review.

Adapting Stephen King’s 1982 novel while escaping the long shadow of the cult-favorite 1987 film, director Edgar Wright faces a tricky balancing act: respect the source, reinvent the spectacle, and deliver an experience that feels urgent in today’s media landscape. The result is an enthralling, incisive dystopian action thriller that blends biting satire with muscular genre filmmaking. With a gripping lead performance from Glen Powell and standout support from Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Lee Pace, and Emilia Jones, The Running Man emerges as one of Wright’s most disciplined—and most politically resonant—films.

Wright’s future-America feels eerily close—grim but recognizable, a society numbed by noise, distraction, and fear. FreeVee, the omnipresent media empire, saturates every waking moment with grotesque entertainment, using spectacle to keep a desperate population docile. This world is not painted with broad strokes but shaped through layered detail: hacked-together slums, sleek broadcast towers stretching like monoliths, and public streets that seem engineered for surveillance and suppression. Every corner of the film feels designed to make entertainment a weapon.

The tone is darker than Wright’s earlier work, but traces of his rhythmic editing, visual wit, and musical finesse are unmistakable. The film moves with propulsive confidence—montages snap like the loading of a gun, and every high-tension sequence has an almost musical flow. Yet Wright avoids parody. He knows the story’s premise is outlandish, but he treats its implications with sobering seriousness, grounding the outrageous in emotional truth.

Powell delivers his strongest work to date as Ben Richards, a man cornered by economic despair and moral outrage. Rather than playing Richards as an invincible action hero, Powell presents him as angry, bewildered, traumatized, and resourceful in equal measure. His early scenes as a blacklisted worker struggling to care for his sick child have a raw, disarming intimacy that pays dividends later, when Richards becomes a symbol for a nation suffocating under corporate power.

As the stakes escalate, Powell shows Richards psychologically unraveling—haunted by paranoia, disillusionment, and the manipulative tactics of the network. It’s a layered performance that communicates both palpable vulnerability and explosive determination. His physicality is excellent, but what lingers most is the emotional exhaustion behind his eyes.

Josh Brolin is perfectly cast as Dan Killian, the slick, smiling executive producer of The Running Man. Brolin plays him not as a cartoon villain but as a polished corporate assassin—articulate, charming, venomous when necessary, and disturbingly reasonable. He embodies the film’s most unsettling truth: that the machinery of oppression often wears a face we instinctively trust.

Colman Domingo brings electric charisma to Bobby Thompson, the beloved television host tasked with manipulating the public narrative. Domingo’s performance is unnervingly good—flamboyant yet ice-cold, playing a man intoxicated by his own influence until the ground beneath him shifts.

Lee Pace is a revelation as Evan McCone, the network’s lead Hunter. His imposing physical presence gives the character immediate credibility, but Pace goes further, infusing McCone with a simmering intensity that hints at a complicated past. He becomes less a faceless pursuer and more a living testament to a system that exploits, breaks, and repurposes human beings.

Michael Cera, as Elton Parrakis, offers a surprisingly understated turn. His performance adds gentle humor without disrupting the film’s tension, and his character becomes an affecting anchor for themes of rebellion, disinformation, and sacrifice.

Though her role as Amelia Williams is smaller than the marketing may suggest, Emilia Jones makes every moment resonate. She plays Amelia as someone pulled suddenly—and unwillingly—from a comfortable, privileged bubble into the violent complexity of a world she never truly saw. Jones brings sincerity and quiet strength to the character, and her evolving dynamic with Powell is one of the film’s emotional highlights. Her performance is impactful precisely because she uses limited screentime to convey a full arc of awakening, empathy, and moral reckoning.

Wright stages the film’s chases and confrontations with exhilarating precision. The action sequences are brutal, grounded, and shot with clarity, emphasizing the vulnerability of the runners rather than glorifying violence. Wright avoids the glossy superhero aesthetic in favor of something grimier, more desperate. The result is a sense of danger that never dissipates.

Yet even at its most explosive, the film remains fixated on ideas rather than spectacle alone. Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall sharpen King’s critique of media manipulation, economic inequality, and manufactured consent, making the film feel like a pointed reflection of modern anxieties. The script smartly emphasizes how narratives are created, edited, deepfaked, and weaponized—a theme explored with unnerving relevance.

Though the film’s first half is remarkably strong, the midsection occasionally sags under the weight of its worldbuilding. A few supporting characters appear briefly and vanish too quickly, leaving their emotional impact muted. Some viewers may also find the tonal oscillation between satire and bleak drama a bit uneven, though the shifts are more deliberate than distracting.

Additionally, while Wright’s direction is precise, the film occasionally leans too heavily on exposition to explicate the larger rebellion forming in the background. The broader societal implications are compelling, but they sometimes feel constrained by the need to maintain the film’s rapid pace.

Despite minor shortcomings, The Running Man stands as a thrilling achievement. Wright delivers a film that entertains with force while challenging audiences to confront the dangers of passive media consumption. It’s fast, furious, and frequently disturbing—but in ways that feel vital rather than gratuitous.

Glen Powell cements himself as a leading man capable of anchoring emotionally charged blockbusters, while the supporting cast—Brolin, Domingo, Pace, Cera, and Jones—inject depth and personality into a story that could have easily become hollow spectacle. Wright’s version of The Running Man isn’t just an update; it’s a reinvention that reflects—and critiques—the world we inhabit today.

Keeper: The BRWC Review.

Osgood Perkins’ Keeper arrives in the crowded landscape of contemporary folk horror with striking imagery, confident performances, and a premise with real potential. Yet despite those strengths—and a committed cast led by Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland—the film struggles to build momentum, sustain tension, or deliver any genuine surprises. What emerges is a moody, visually refined work that too often feels inert, predictable, and more invested in atmosphere than storytelling. Graced with glimmers of the filmmaker’s trademark unsettling sensibility but weighed down by sluggish pacing and thin character work, Keeper winds up a frustratingly uneven experience, landing squarely as a 2/5 effort.

The initial setup is a strong one: Liz (Maslany), an artist still attempting to define her life’s direction, is whisked away by her boyfriend Malcolm (Sutherland) to a secluded cabin for their anniversary. Quickly, the sense of isolation takes hold. Perkins leans into long, drifting shots of the surrounding forest, allowing nature to feel both indifferent and quietly menacing. The arrival of Malcolm’s overbearing cousin Darren (Birkett Turton) and his cryptic girlfriend Minka (Eden Weiss) injects a jolt of discomfort, albeit a brief one. Their dynamic hints at comedy-of-manners awkwardness, but it’s clear early on that the film wants to push toward something more opaque and unsettling.

The problem is that the tension never fully tightens. Liz’s nightmares and visions escalate—bloodied women screaming, a pregnant woman who looks like her, the disturbing pull of the mysterious cake in the cabin—but these moments are spaced far too widely and unfold at a glacial pace. Perkins aims for slow-burn horror, but the film frequently mistakes stillness for suspense; long stretches in the first half feel shapeless rather than deliberate. Scenes drift rather than build, and each eerie moment arrives without leaving much of a lingering chill.

This structural sagging diminishes the impact of Liz’s discovery of the cake’s hidden horrors and Minka’s abrupt disappearance in the woods. Both events should mark dramatic turning points, but because the surrounding narrative idles so much, they instead come and go with less propulsion than expected. The film promises escalation but repeatedly resets to a low simmer, testing the viewer’s patience.

What rescues Keeper from becoming outright tedium is the strength of its cast. Maslany delivers a textured, emotionally grounded performance, anchoring the film even as the script gives Liz frustratingly passive stretches. She convincingly navigates paranoia, fear, anger, and a creeping sense of betrayal. Sutherland, meanwhile, imbues Malcolm with a soft-spoken uncertainty that gradually hardens into something more ominous. His turn from seemingly gentle partner to chilling manipulator is telegraphed early on—part of the film’s predictability problem—but Sutherland’s commitment lends it gravity.

Turton and Weiss bring welcome energy as Darren and Minka. Darren’s blustering, boundaryless behavior adds dimension to his eventual unraveling, while Weiss walks a fine line between the uncanny and the grounded in her limited screen time. Their presence punctuates the film with flashes of unease and dark humor that the script could have used more of.

Yet even with these strong performances, the film’s most significant narrative revelations land with little impact. Malcolm’s confession—that he and Darren tortured and murdered a pregnant woman centuries ago, somehow receiving extended life from the inhuman creatures she birthed—is delivered in an extended monologue that clearly aims to shock. Instead, it feels like the natural end point of breadcrumbs that were too obvious from the outset. The “immortal men feeding women to monstrous forest offspring” twist is so heavily signposted that its arrival carries no surprise, only a sense of inevitability.

Perkins has always been a visually sensitive director, and Keeper maintains that reputation. The cinematography is consistently gorgeous: thick woods bathed in muted greens and grays, candlelit interiors that glow with a sinister warmth, and night sequences that swallow characters in velvety pockets of darkness. Perkins and his cinematographer capture the environment with an painterly eye, and several individual shots—Liz devouring cake in the dead of night, severed fingers hidden beneath frosting, ghostly forms drifting through the cabin—are chilling on their own.

But stylish images can only do so much when the narrative they support feels thin. The film leans heavily on its aesthetic, layering in visual motifs and unsettling compositions to suggest thematic heft the script doesn’t meaningfully explore. The creatures—twisted beings born from violence and neglect—could have symbolized inherited guilt, cycles of patriarchal control, or the monstrous consequences of buried sins. Instead, they function mostly as eerie background presences until a chaotic final act that accelerates too quickly and explains too much.

This climax arrives in a rush after so much languid buildup, giving it an oddly disjointed feel. What should read as a cathartic reversal instead feels like a tonal shift into campy operatics, one not fully earned by the quiet dread preceding it.

There’s no denying that the film’s ending is its boldest stretch. Liz’s confrontation with Malcolm, the reveal of the creatures worshiping her, and her cold, methodical revenge are arresting sequences. Maslany shines here, delivering a haunting, feral presence once Liz’s eyes turn fully black. The imagery is memorable, even iconic in moments.

Yet the pathway to this finale is so weighed down by narrative predictability and pacing issues that the payoff doesn’t hit as hard as it should. The film’s thematic gestures toward justice, identity, and victimhood feel underdeveloped; the emotional stakes, despite Maslany’s best efforts, never gain the necessary depth to elevate the ending beyond shock value.

Keeper is not without merit. Perkins’ direction exhibits undeniable craftsmanship, the cinematography is consistently arresting, and the performances are strong across the board. However, the film ultimately falters due to sluggish pacing, a predictable central twist, and an overreliance on visual style to mask narrative thinness. While horror fans may find individual moments to admire, the overall experience feels fragmented and shallow.

Eternity: The BRWC Review.

David Freyne’s Eternity arrives as a rare blend of fantasy, romance, and existential comedy, weaving together the emotional tenor of a mature love story with the whimsy of an imaginative afterlife. Written by Freyne and Pat Cunnane, the film takes a high-concept premise—one week in the afterlife to choose where and with whom you’ll spend eternity—and turns it into a tender, humorous, and surprisingly grounded meditation on long-term love, the weight of memory, and the possibility of choosing happiness even after life has ended. Anchored by a deeply affecting performance from Elizabeth Olsen and two charm-filled supporting turns by Miles Teller and Callum Turner, Eternity manages to feel warm, witty, and occasionally aching, even as it glides through fantastical terrain.

Freyne constructs an afterlife that never leans on ethereal solemnity. Instead, it’s bureaucratic, gently absurd, and delightfully humane. Deceased individuals are assigned coordinators who walk them through their one-week decision period, guiding them toward the person or the version of the afterlife that suits them best. This is where Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early shine as Anna and Ryan, afterlife guides with impeccable scene-stealing instincts. Randolph’s disarming warmth and Early’s frantic, overly involved enthusiasm give the film a comedic crackle that counterbalances the story’s emotional weight.

Olsen’s Joan enters this system with a lifetime of love behind her and an unresolved love ahead. She must choose between Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of many years, and Luke (Callum Turner), her youthful first love who died in war decades earlier. This premise could easily tilt toward melodrama, but the script treats the emotional stakes with sincerity and humor. Freyne and Cunnane write dialogue that feels lived-in and textured, rich with the kind of unspoken history that accumulates over a lifetime.

What makes Eternity so compelling is Olsen’s softly devastating portrait of a woman caught between two versions of happiness. Joan’s emotional landscape is complex—there is no villain here, no easy choice, no simple assignment of blame or longing. Olsen plays her with a mixture of clarity and confusion, showing a woman who has loved deeply twice and fears the consequences of hurting either man forever.

Her chemistry with both Teller and Turner shines in distinct ways. With Turner’s Luke, there’s a youthful glow—playful glances, familiar teasing, the kind of effortless emotional shorthand that often defines early love. Their scenes together possess a warm nostalgia, the sense of a path cut short but never fully abandoned. Turner plays Luke with a calm, generous presence; he is both who he once was and a slightly idealized memory of that person, lending their dynamic a dreamlike quality.

Teller’s Larry, by contrast, carries the weight of a life shared—mortgages, disappointments, triumphs, private jokes, the mundane miracle of long-term partnership. Teller excels at playing ordinary men with understated emotional truth, and his performance here is no exception. Larry is not perfect, but he is real, and Teller gives him a vulnerability that grounds the entire film. His scenes with Olsen feel layered with decades of affection and frustration, capturing how love evolves over time into something steady, imperfect, but deeply meaningful.

Despite its inherently emotional premise, Eternity is frequently funny. Freyne infuses the afterlife with the same observational humor he brought to his earlier work, and Cunnane’s co-writing adds a sprightly political-comedy rhythm to bureaucratic exchanges. John Early is especially hysterical as Joan’s afterlife coordinator Ryan, whose overly involved approach to guiding her borders on helicopter parenting. His comedic timing injects levity at precisely the right moments, preventing the film from sliding into excessive sentimentality.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s performance offers a softer comedic touch, built on empathy and subtle delivery. She becomes a quiet anchor in the story, often saying more through her expressions than through dialogue. Together, these supporting performances lend the film a tonal balance that makes its shifts into emotional territory feel earned rather than forced.

The film’s structure embraces the idea that emotional clarity does not follow linear rules. Joan moves between Larry and Luke in a series of visits that feel both dreamlike and deeply human. Freyne treats time in the afterlife as fluid, allowing Joan to revisit versions of her life that feel suspended—moments with Luke that reflect what might have been, moments with Larry that reflect what truly was.

The cinematography supports this sense of temporal elasticity. Scenes with Luke carry a hazy, almost mythic glow, while scenes with Larry are lit with a grounded warmth that emphasizes tangible memories rather than idealized fantasies. Freyne’s visual choices subtly bolster the film’s emotional logic: nostalgia is beautiful but hazy, while shared reality is vivid even in its imperfections.

The film’s pacing is gentle yet assured. Some sequences linger a beat longer than expected, inviting viewers to sit with Joan’s indecision. In a lesser film, these pauses might feel indulgent, but here they serve a purpose—they mimic the rhythm of grief, reflection, and the slow unveiling of what truly matters.

Perhaps the film’s most affecting element is its refusal to simplify Joan’s dilemma. Love is not a ledger, nor a contest between equally matched suitors; it is a set of lived experiences that define a life. Freyne refuses to make Joan’s choice binary or moralistic. Instead, he gives her a decision shaped by desire, duty, memory, and the unknowable terrain of the heart.

The film’s most poignant scenes come when Joan confronts the version of herself she was with Luke and the version she became with Larry. Both relationships are presented with deep respect. When the final choice arrives, it feels neither triumphant nor tragic—it feels human.

The ending is touching in a quiet way, offering closure without tying every emotional thread into a neat bow. Freyne allows the film to settle into a space of acceptance, emphasizing that eternity is not about perfection but about peace. The final scenes resonate because they reflect the film’s central belief: love is shaped not just by passion or longevity, but by the moments that define who we are.

Eternity succeeds because it blends whimsy with emotional intelligence, crafting a portrait of love that feels expansive, compassionate, and earnestly funny. Elizabeth Olsen delivers one of her most heartfelt performances, supported by Teller and Turner’s nuanced portrayals. With its inventive world-building, warm humor, and reflective storytelling, the film stands out as one of the more thoughtful romantic comedies in recent years.

Christy: The BRWC Review

David Michôd’s Christy arrives as both a bruising sports biopic and a harrowing survival story, tracing the life of Christy Martin, the trailblazing boxer who shattered barriers for women in the ring. With Sydney Sweeney delivering a fiercely physical and emotionally raw performance, the film explores Martin’s meteoric rise in the 1990s and the unimaginable violence she endured behind closed doors with her husband and trainer, James V. Martin (Ben Foster). What unfolds is a gripping, enraging, and deeply human story that balances triumph and trauma with sobering realism, even if its structure occasionally leans on familiar beats of the sports-biopic tradition.

The film opens in coal country West Virginia, immersing viewers in the quiet suffocation of Christy’s small-town upbringing. There’s no romanticizing here—just the sense of a young woman boxed in by expectation long before she ever stepped into a ring. Michôd renders the landscape in muted earth tones, emphasizing a life waiting to be punched through. Christy’s parents, portrayed with a chilling strictness by Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry, impose conservative values that smother rather than shape, setting the stage for Christy’s lifelong struggle with identity, independence, and courage in every sphere of her life.

When Christy discovers boxing, it isn’t presented as destiny but release. Her first fight has a raw, underground grit reminiscent of The Fighter and Million Dollar Baby, yet Sweeney imbues it with a hungry defiance all her own. The sequences in these early bouts pulse with adrenaline and uncertainty, showing a woman discovering not just a talent, but something close to self-worth. Michôd’s camera work is tight and aggressive—blood, breath, the thud of gloves—turning each match into a fully sensory experience.

Sweeney, who has been steadily broadening her dramatic repertoire, delivers her most commanding film performance yet. This isn’t simply a physical transformation; she plays Christy as a contradiction in motion—charismatic yet vulnerable, brash yet fearful, a fighter who can’t always fight for herself outside the ropes. Her portrayal captures the rage and longing that fuel Christy’s ambition, and she nails the showmanship that made the “Coal Miner’s Daughter” a pay-per-view sensation.

In the ring, she is electric. Outside it, she is heartbreaking.

Ben Foster’s Jim Martin is terrifying without ever tipping into caricature. He begins as a gruff, controlling mentor before gradually revealing the depth of his cruelty. Foster’s ability to embody quiet menace is chilling; he makes Jim’s manipulative grip feel suffocating even in moments of calm. The scenes depicting their marriage are some of the film’s most powerful—not because they sensationalize violence, but because they convey psychological domination with unnerving subtlety. When violence does erupt, it’s filmed with unflinching realism, culminating in the brutal attempted murder that nearly ended Christy’s life in 2010.

While Christy is packed with kinetic fight sequences, the film operates just as forcefully as a psychological drama. Christy’s relationship with her mother is fraught with religious judgment and emotional coldness, embodied chillingly by Wever, who adds nuance to a role that could have been one-note. There is pain in her performance—disappointment, fear, and hints of denial that suggest she is as much a product of repression as she is an enforcer of it.

The presence of Katy O’Brian as Lisa Holewyne, Christy’s rival in the ring, provides both narrative momentum and emotional counterbalance. Their matches are tense and thrilling, but their respectful dynamic hints at the community and solidarity Christy could never find at home. O’Brian’s athletic presence grounds the fight sequences, offering a mirror to Christy’s strength and loneliness in equal measure.

Where Christy stumbles is largely in its adherence to biopic convention. The training montages, media surge, and eventual crash into personal despair follow a rhythm audiences will recognize. The predictability doesn’t sink the film, but it keeps it from rising to the level of reinvention achieved by more daring sports dramas such as Foxcatcher or I, Tonya. Some viewers may wish the script pushed deeper into Christy’s internal life, particularly her struggles with sexuality and identity in a conservative world, themes that feel rich but slightly under-explored.

Even so, Michôd’s direction remains fierce and purposeful, and the screenplay by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes finds real emotional truth in Christy’s resilience. The final act, dealing with Christy’s survival and testimony after her husband’s attack, is devastating and inspiring in equal measure. The film refuses to sanitize trauma or offer easy catharsis, instead allowing Christy’s story to land with the complicated force that real resilience demands.

The filmmaking is textured and cleverly measured. Grainy cinematography echoes 1990s television broadcast aesthetics during televised fights, while quieter moments favor close-ups that linger on Sweeney’s bruised vulnerability and raw determination. The editing keeps bouts tight and bruising, and the sound design mixes crowd noise, glove impact, and heartbeat-like thuds to simulate the claustrophobic intensity of professional fighting.

The score swells at expected moments but feels restrained enough to avoid melodrama. Instead, many key emotional beats rely more on silence, breathing, or the subtle scrape of gloves on tape. Christy’s pain and power are allowed to fill the space.

Christy is a powerful tribute to a woman who fought battles few ever saw, and even fewer understood. It is a story of survival, ambition, and the cost of breaking barriers in a world determined to keep women out of the ring—and in their place. Though its structure follows a familiar blueprint, the storytelling is urgent and compassionate, anchored by a breathtaking performance from Sydney Sweeney and brutally grounded turns by Ben Foster and Merritt Wever.

The film doesn’t reinvent the boxing biopic, but it hits hard and earns its bruises. Christy Martin’s legacy—punched into history with blood, sweat, and unimaginable willpower—deserves a film of this caliber. It isn’t flawless, but it’s gripping, deeply felt, and ultimately triumphant.

Sentimental Value: The BRWC Review.

Joachim Trier has long been one of cinema’s most perceptive observers of human fragility, the slipperiness of memory, and the uneasy intersection between yearning and regret. With Sentimental Value, his reunion with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, he returns to familiar thematic terrain—complicated love, lost time, the ghosts of choices made and unmade—yet his canvas feels even richer here. This is a film of quiet devastations and sharp stings, of uncomfortable laughter and sudden vulnerability. Beneath its soft comedic charm beats a wounded, searching heart.

Trier builds this new story around a filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), in the twilight of his career, who seeks to excavate family trauma for one last great work. That premise sounds ripe for satire—and the film does indulge in gently poking at the ego and self-mythology of artists—but Trier refuses cynicism. He gives us a man wrestling not only with legacy but with guilt, cowardice, and the irrevocable consequences of absence. The film is simultaneously about cinema as an act of preservation and cinema as an act of trespass. What right do we have to turn personal pain into narrative? When does remembrance become narcissism?

Gustav’s estranged daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), embody two distinct responses to abandonment. Nora, a devoted stage actress, is a tightly wound coil of discipline and resentment. Agnes, who chose the comforts of routine and family life, hides her hurt under politeness and an almost compulsive desire to keep things calm. The death of their mother Sissel forces the trio back into reluctant orbit, and the environment Trier builds around them—wintry landscapes, hushed rooms full of emotional history—feels thick with unsaid things. The family home, still co-owned by Gustav, becomes more than a setting; it is a memory-bruise, a sanctuary and a cage.

When Gustav reveals his intention to dramatize the story of his mother’s suicide—spurred by Nazi-inflicted trauma—the film deepens. There’s tenderness in his desire to honor her and arrogance in assuming he is the rightful narrator. His first misstep is offering Nora the role of her grandmother. Her refusal, steeped in years of emotional self-preservation, lights the fuse. In her place, Gustav casts Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood star played by Elle Fanning with delightful precision. Rachel is luminous, eager, culturally curious—and completely unaware of the psychic landmine she’s stepping into.

Fanning’s performance is a marvel of well-intentioned disruption. Her Rachel is earnest, a little naive, and desperate to do right by a family that cannot decide whether to welcome her or hold her at arm’s length. She becomes both muse and mirror, revealing the absurdities in Gustav’s quest and the contradictions in the sisters’ resentment. The film’s funniest moments often involve Rachel trying to navigate Norwegian emotional etiquette, or to interpret Gustav’s cryptic blend of artistic longing and self-pity.

Yet Trier never allows the humor to feel cruel. His comedy always stems from human awkwardness—the ways people try, fail, and embarrass themselves while reaching for connection. The laughs disarm, opening space for the ache. And the ache cuts deep.

Skarsgård gives one of his most quietly devastating performances. Gustav is selfish, charming, afraid, nostalgic, and sometimes heartbreakingly sincere. Skarsgård plays him as someone who knows he has failed but hopes that art might serve as absolution. Watching him fumble intimacy with his daughters is painful, tender, and painfully recognizable. He does not plead for sympathy, yet the vulnerability in his pauses, the tremor in his stillness, evokes it anyway.

Reinsve continues to prove herself one of the most compelling screen talents working today. Nora’s steel-edge self-discipline fractures gradually, and Trier captures her unraveling with warmth rather than judgment. When Nora finally allows herself to feel—not simply to perform feeling—the release is shattering. Lilleaas, meanwhile, gives Agnes a delicate, layered sadness; her performance speaks in small gestures, in the tightening of shoulders, in half-suppressed grief. Watching her reckon with both love and disappointment feels like witnessing someone breathe through pain in real time.

Trier’s direction is characteristically gentle, lyrical, and precise. His camera lingers not just on faces but on pauses, silences, the emotional texture of rooms. Those who loved The Worst Person in the World will find similar intimacy here, though Sentimental Value has a more mature melancholy. It feels like the film of someone reflecting on aging, parents, and the unchangeability of history—personal and national.

The autobiographical filmmaking plot risks meta-self-indulgence, yet Trier sidesteps the trap by interrogating the very impulse he dramatizes. Gustav’s project is at once noble and corrosive. He wants to tell the truth but also to control the narrative. He wants forgiveness, yet refuses to give up authorship. The film asks whether reliving trauma through art is healing or exploitative, and it offers no easy answers. Instead, it holds space for contradiction, for the possibility that love and harm can coexist.

The cinematography, restrained and wintry, leans into natural light and emotional realism. Every frame feels composed yet lived-in. Music is used sparingly and effectively—a quiet piano here, a nostalgic folk song there—never dictating emotion but underlining it with gentle insistence. The production design brilliantly contrasts artistic spaces and domestic ones: rehearsal rooms, archival film screens, childhood bedrooms preserved like mausoleums of memory.

If there is any critique, it is that the film occasionally lingers too long in introspection; some viewers may crave sharper narrative propulsion. But such patience is part of Trier’s language, and those willing to surrender to its rhythm will find it richly rewarding. The ending, poetic rather than conclusively neat, settles like soft snowfall—melancholic, hopeful, unresolved in the way real relationships often remain.

What lingers most is the film’s emotional honesty. Sentimental Value understands that reconciliation is not a single gesture but a series of small, tentative bridges built across years of hurt. It understands the strange duality of family—that we long for closeness even as we resist vulnerability. And it understands that stories, once told, can both free and bind.

Trier has crafted a film that feels bruised and beautiful, wry and aching. It belongs to the realm of memory-cinema: works that do not simply depict life but feel like remembering life. With luminous performances, emotional precision, and an unguarded compassion, Sentimental Value becomes exactly what its title suggests—not sentimental in tone, but emotionally treasured, quietly precious, carried with you long after the credits roll.