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Review by Karsten ★★★★½ Liked

skol!

Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from…

2

Obvious highlight from Cannes, few people can capture an honest tenderness and vulnerability between people like Trier.

9

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is by far the best film I’ve seen at Cannes and the best film of the year so far. Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve have done it again, as “The Worst Person in the World” duo reunite to tell an affecting, complex, and deeply personal story about love, family, home, and artistic expression as a means of healing and moving on. Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård deliver excellent, nuanced performances as a father and daughter with a complicated relationship. In fact, the entire cast is phenomenal. Some of the best editing of the year, accompanied by a delicate, beautiful score throughout. A brilliantly written exploration of loneliness & depression that will both break and heal your heart.

Check out my full review on Next Best Picture here

5

I love my dad I love my sisters I love this movie I feel so sentimental

Review by iana ★★★★★ Liked

review to come but adored to bits this funny, moving, beautiful movie about family and cinema’s power to heal. finally some good fucking food

Review by Ella Kemp Liked

Thinking of that Cinematic Orchestra song, of Here, of building a little life, of letting feelings grow and relationships mature, of understanding when you’re not enough of yourself to be anything for anyone else, of the films that don’t let you jump too soon and make you listen to what’s ticking in your head and rattling in your heart. Forgot that this is the whole point, etc.

Review by iana ★★★★★ Liked

At the Cannes press conference for Sentimental Value, director Joachim Trier declared that “tenderness is the new punk.” The Norwegian filmmaker framed this in opposition to the division that is omnipresent in the world, but there’s truth to the statement in another sense. That there’s something radical in listening and embracing the other. There’s something powerful, too, in learning to look outward—to consider that offering a hand can be also personally transformative. Maybe this all sounds a little “be kind” nicecore, but Trier grounds the miraculous Sentimental Value in such emotional complexity that not a single moment of tenderness rings false. 

Full review: a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/film/cannes-2025/sentimental-value-joachim-trier-review/

Review by Thomas Flight ★★★★½ Liked

While it doesn’t have some of the punchy-youthful energy that Worst Person in the World did, that largely feels by design. This is a more mature, understated work and Trier’s direction is confident and precise without ever feeling constrained. By the end I was absolutely glued to the screen, just aching for these characters to find what they are looking for. One of my favorites of Cannes this year and early in the running for my favorite films of the year, one I'll gladly recommend to pretty much anyone.

Also there's a gag for cinephiles in here that was probably one of the biggest laughs at Cannes all week.

Full review in my coverage of Cannes Week 2.

2

Like the sound of birds taking flight: distinct and certain soaring is possible. Each scene bookended by cuts to black that feel as though we are slowly moving from room to room inside a home that holds our sharpest and most tender moments. Our secrets settle into the floorboards, our laughter floats near the ceiling, our cries and shouts soak into the walls. The home sees us in a way no other place does, it knows us the most intimately. Riveted by how Sentimental Values transforms that belief into something larger and so fully realized. It makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

Review by Robert Daniels ★★★★½ Liked

In writer/director Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” a quietly seismic familial dramedy, are two close sisters, a distant father and an indispensable home linked to generations worth of emotional turmoil. Trier’s gnawing, intimate follow-up to “The Worst Person in the World,” finds the profound in the mundane, resolution in ambiguity, and healing in pain. This is also a film about filmmaking and artistry, which asks these bewitchingly flawed characters to forgive by creating. [full capsule review via RogerEbert]

Review by timtamtitus ★★★★

being the worst person in the world seems to run in the family