The Danish-Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier makes films that appeal to the audience that wants to watch Woody Allen movies — only without the guilt. Trier’s breakout hit, The Worst Person in the World (2021), was a sharp, poignant, funny, sad film, starring Renate Reinsve, about falling in and out of love, in the vein of Annie Hall.
His new movie, Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, also stars Reinsve, this time as the daughter of a famous but impossible movie director played by Stellan Skarsgard. It’s a little like one of those Allen movies from the mid-Eighties such as Hannah and Her Sisters, which performs the magic trick of making one family’s secrets, lies, silences and memories feel like your own.
It works marvellously well. The movie is told from the point of view of the family house, which looks like something out of a fairytale. Dark, wooden, with a steeply gabled roof and cherry-red trim, it sits in the middle of a leafy Oslo suburb, with a crack crawling up one wall, “as if the house was sinking in very slow motion” — much like the family who live there.
Nora (Reinsve) is a successful theatre actress who is, she tells her married lover, only 80 per cent messed up. “Why didn’t our childhood ruin you?” she asks her contentedly married sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). The ostensible cause of her hurt is their father, Gustav (Skarsgard), who waltzes back into their lives after a prolonged absence to ask Nora to star in his latest film. He seems to take illicit delight in the fact that the waitress who serves them lunch thinks they are a couple. So that kind of father.
She turns him down — naturally — so he casts a young American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who seems a little infatuated with the attentions of her new roué-mentor after he liberates her from her entourage on a dusky beach.
Skarsgard is superb in the role. When Hollywood wants a villain it often comes calling — he played the chilling Martin Vanger in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — but Skarsgard is at his absolute best when asked to combine his foxlike charisma and cunning with deep reserves of selfishness. He was, in other words, born to play a film director. Gustave is the kind of man who uses people in a way that leaves them bereft and dazzled. Directing the impressionable Kemp through a scene of family suicide, he convinces her the stool she uses was the same stool his mother used. In fact, it’s from Ikea.
The joke neatly jabs at our reverence for gloomy Scandinavian auteurs and the film plays a little like Ingmar Bergman at his most audience-friendly when he made Fanny and Alexander. It’s got the same mixture of gossipy warmth and powerful, underplayed emotion.
Reinsve seems to give nothing away and yet there’s not a scene she’s in where we’re not clued into Nora’s emotions. The acting is almost invisible. Nora, it becomes clear, is the mirror image of her father: giving free rein to her emotions only under the cover of the art. Trier has plenty of both up his sleeve, combining the satisfactions of arthouse film-making with the emotional wallop of great melodrama.
15, 133min
★★★★★
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Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue
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It’s only January but 2026 will be hard-pressed to produce a weirder film than Song Sung Blue. Hugh Jackman plays Mike Sardina, a down-on-his-luck musician in Milwaukee, who meets the love of his life, a Patsy Cline impersonator called Claire (Kate Hudson), and forms a Neil Diamond tribute band called Lightning & Thunder.
As Claire says: “Nostalgia pays.” If there’s any shame in that, Jackman and Hudson betray not a flicker of recognition. Two of the biggest hams in the business slice it thick, grinning and shimmying and hollering their way through a series of Diamond classics — Cherry, Cherry, Sweet Caroline, Forever in Blue Jeans — in a triumph-over-adversity musical of such turbocharged cheesiness it almost slides into David Lynch surrealism.
Claire loses a leg but soldiers on through her painkiller addiction. Her stump is the most realistic-looking thing in the movie. Mike shrugs off numerous heart attacks, at one point reviving himself with a defibrillator to perform Sweet Caroline in a Thai restaurant. Apparently this all happened: the film was adapted from a 2023 documentary, which only goes to show reality is a poor screenwriter.
In 20 years’ time Song Sung Blue will probably be a camp classic playing as part of a double-bill with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Showgirls. But to qualify for “so bad it’s good”, first you have to be bad … very bad.
12, 133min
★★☆☆☆
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