AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: A-

I think James Cameron wants the Avatar films to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Star Wars films—a modern mythology, with the same cultural impact as well as staying power. (Some might argue that Marvel already achieved this, but their moves are not going to have the same staying power.) Cameron is such a directorial megalomaniac, he’s probably convinced these films already have that status. He would be wrong.

To be fair. it had long been widely understood that it is a mistake to underestimate James Cameron. But these movies can only run on their own steam for so long. Avatar was a monumental technical achievement in 2009, and was worthy of its Best Picture nomination (although it would have been a crime had it won). The same could be said, actually, of Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel Cameron took 13 years to make because he was waiting for technology to advance enough so it could achieve his aims. And it’s worth repeating that The Way of Water was so stunning on a visual level, it arguably moved visual effects forward for the entire industry in a way no other film has since Jurassic Park.

So here is where we run into Avatar: Fire and Ash, only three years after the last one—usually a pretty standard duration between films and their sequels, but we all know the Avatar franchise is a different beast altogether. And the criticisms of this film as being entertaining but repetitive are fundamentally valid. With one notable exception, the characters are all the same as they were in the last film, and the things that happen onscreen offer us very little that’s new. Okay, there are some very cool new Panodorian creatures, including giant floating beasts that pull ships for travel, and vicious squid-like creatures that live in the oceans.

None of them feature as actual characters, though. The only beasts who do are the Tulkun, the highly intelligent whale-like creatures that featured prominently in The Way of Water, and do again here. And so does Quaritch (Stephen Long). And so does Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), who—spoiler alert!—did not die in The Way of Water after all. I walked out of this movie saying that if this series has taught us anything, it’s that any onscreen “death” cannot be trusted. More than one character in Fire and Ash meets an end that is one way or another is left ambiguous. But even if it were unambiguous, would it matter? This is a world in which “sky people” (humans from Earth) can be transformed into Na’vi and there can be an Avatar-maculate conception, after all.

Side note on the Tulkun whales: who the hell does their piercings and tattoos, anyway?

All of this is to say: if you’re looking for a 2025 blockbuster with endless opportunity for nitpicking, I present to you Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s worth mentioning that this has a franchise-record runtime of three hours and 17 minutes (exceeding The Way of Water by five minutes), and it is far less successful than its predecessor at justifying its own length. The Way of Water is easily broken up into three parts, the middle of which is world-building that easily wowed audiences; the last of which is a truly thrilling succession of action sequences. Fire and Ash attempts to building on that foundation, but does far less world-building, overindulges on action sequences, and at the sacrifice of character development.

To be fair, I was still perfectly happy to have gone to see this movie, as many of its action sequences are indeed thrilling. The visual effects are nearly as stunning as they were in the previous film; the inevitable downside to this coming out only three years later is that it’s unable to offer us anything truly novel on that front. The visual effects are the reason to see any of these movies, though, and they are what sets these films apart from others that use 3D as a cheap trick. Cameron knows how to make 3D worth the effort, and this is an extremely rare case in which I was also thrilled to see it in that format. That said, while the creature and Na’vi designs are exceptional, there are still moments when characters leap long distances and don’t quite move the way they should. It’s very subtle, but still gives them a hint of looking like video game characters rather than a believable character in a richly built universe.

In addition to Quaritch, who is really growing stale as an antagonist in all three of these movies, Fire and Ash does give us one new major villain: Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People, a clan of Na’vi whose forests have been decimated by a nearby volcano. This is a compelling addition to this world, especially the idea of warring clans on Pandora whose beefs actually have nothing to do with the Sky People. Except the Ash People’s motives, and especially Varang’s, are never clearly defined, and as a people they are given far less nuance than the Na’vi. At least we can understand the Na’vi as a narrative example of cultural appropriation. The Ash People are just angry and sadistic, and read a little too much like so-called “savages” of the Old West who are thought to commit unspeakable horrors against outsiders for no discernible reason.

I wish Varang had more depth as a character, and certainly more autonomy. Here she’s just hungry for the power of Sky People’s military guns, and that hunger is easily manipulated by Quaritch. Thank Eywa we have the likes of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a 76-year-old woman again doing motion-capture as a teenager) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) to serve as women characters who actually have some dimension. At least Fire and Ash passes the Bechdel Test.

Most of the time in Fire and Ash, though, there are just battles raging. One after the other, and this with multiple subplots that don’t all feel necessary. Maybe Cameron feels all of these narrative threads are vital for what’s to come in future sequels, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Kiri’s power to lock in with Eywa stayed mysterious through all of The Way of Water, and gets some further expansion and explanation here—some of which is legitimately dumb. I suppose that could be the tagline for Avatar as a franchise: “great action epics, some of which is legitimately dumb.”

Fire and Ash does bring Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) back around to his status as “Toruk Makto,” the legendary leader who unites the clans—his Leonopteryx, the giant bird-like creature he rides, is a loyal friend who is to a degree a creature-character in these films, as are, to a lesser degree, the banshees ridden by all the other Na’vi. None of this changes the problematic trope this title represents. When we hear the line, “Toruk Makto is coming!”—what. heard was: “White Savior is coming!” (Just because Jake was transformed into a blue-skinned human/Na’vi hybrid does not change what he represents in the narrative.)

And yet. And yet! This is how it is with all Avatar movies: they are riddled with flaws, particularly in the writing but also increasingly in the plotting and even the editing—but the things that are actually great about them make the flaws easier to overlook. Is that right? Perhaps not. Does James Cameron even understand a nuanced discussion of these things? I have my doubts. Is the man still a master at delivering mesmerizing entertainment? Absolutely. There is no question that I was on the edge of my seat and dazzled by Fire and Ash a whole lot of the time. I can’t say I was ever bored, in spite of the bloated runtime. What still defines this film more than anything, however, is this franchise’s diminishing returns. We can only hope that Avatar 4 will offer us something genuinely new, but being the fourth film in a series makes that a pretty tall order. It may be that we underestimate James Cameron at our own peril, but it’s starting to feel like he’s getting tired.

Overall: B

DUST BUNNY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

Why does nobody know about this movie? This is a movie that deserves to be known, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it. If I ever saw a trailer, it was only once. Dust Bunny opened this last weekend on 402 theater screens and it made . . . $341,283. It was #17 its opening weekend. To be a little fair, it made an average of $848 per screen (and if we average $15 per ticket that’s about 57 tickets per screening). I can tell you this much: at the showing I just went to, I was one of three people in the theater. It’s hard not to conclude that someone in the marketing department at Roadside Attractions really dropped the ball.

Granted, Dust Bunny, a dark and twisted fantasty-action-monster movie, is not the kind of movie people pack theaters to see anymore. I actually took a public transit ride, on both a light rail train and a bus, for nearly an hour to a suburban theater to see it—and I found it to be completely worth the effort. I doubt I could find another person who would feel the same. Perhaps a fair number of people will soon discover it on a streamer. I can only hope. I’m already eager to introduce it to people I’m sure will have never heard of it.

This is a pretty impressive feature film debut by writer-director Bryan Fuller, who up to now made a long career out of writing and producing television shows, from Pushing Daisies to Hannbial, not to mention no fewer than four different Star Trek series over the past three decades. Dust Bunny stars Mads Mikkelsen, who played Hannibal Lecter in the aforementioned Hannbal series. This is the one major involvement in Fuller’s past career that has a clear connection to Dust Bunny, which is a lot like a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and Kill Bill.

To be fair, I struggle to pinpoint who exactly the target audience is for Dust Bunny, unless you count—me. I am exactly the target audience for Dust Bunny, which I found utterly delightful. Its playful use of a child’s wild imagination crossed with real-world violence is very much my jam. It’s a fantasy movie, a monster movie, and an action movie all rolled up into one. It has a sensibility largely like a kids’ fantasy, with a little girl named Aurora (a wonderful Sophie Sloan) at its center. Mikkelsen plays the unnamed neighbor hitman who Aurora hires to kill the monster under her bed, who she believes ate her parents.

In the opening sequence, we see a tuft of dust floating through the air, past a city skyline that is clearly a mashup of London and New York, and into an apartment window. The camera follows it as it wafts through the apartment, picking up more tufts, until it becomes a little bunny, hiding under Aurora’s bed. Aurora is terrified, and over the course of the film, the bunny grows into a monster that lives under the floorboards of her room. The angled boards tip up in very cool ways as the dust bunny eventually breaks through the floors to eat its victims—and, spoiler alert, there are many victims.

Several scenes go by before it becomes even halfway clear what the hell is going on, but I was locked in from the first frame, with the darkly colorful production design and swooping camera movements, almost like the movie Hugo had gone through some kind of underworld filter. Aurora follows the hitman through the city, observing him from rooftops as he appears to slay a dragon—something he later insists was a group of men. Many scenes follow in which Aurora insists there is a real monster under the floor, and the hitman insists she just thinks that’s what she saw but there have been dangerous men in her apartment. Dust Bunny never wants to make clear which thing is actually going on, although it does eventually lean hard on one side, at which point I’ll admit that if it was going for metaphor, it kind of lacks clarity on that front.

But I can hardly be bothered to care, I had such a good time with this movie, from start to finish. I haven’t even mentioned Sigourney Weaver yet, who shows up as an associate of our hitman, evidently a longtime mentor, perhaps something with a deeper connection. Weaver is 76 years old now, and after seeing her clearly de-aged in the Avatar movies, it’s refreshing to see her actually looking her age. Her Laverne in Dust Bunny is both subtly and delightfully villainous; two characters get key moments in this movie involving stiletto heels, but Laverne’s hybrid pistol-heels are my favorite. There are also well-played smaller parts by The Woman King’s Sheila Atim and The Suicide Squad’s own Polka-Dot Man, David Dastmalchian.

There’s a peculiarness to the tone of Dust Bunny that really speaks to me, such as the moment we are introduced to Laverne, she suddenly opens her mouth wide in an almost grotesque way, explaining that she needs to do it in order to un-clench her jaw. Laverne spends the entire movie talking about how Aurora needs to be killed, because she’s seen the hitman’s face, and other killers are apparently after her. Eventually we learn that Aurora is a foster child now in her third family; this, I guess, makes it easier to take that who we initially assumed were her parents disappear from the movie after only a couple of scenes. Mikkelsen’s hitman has taken a liking to Aurora, which Laverne deduces is his attempt at working through his own childhood trauma.

The whole London/New York vibe is hard to pin down given that all the characters speak with American accents, save for the hitman, who speaks with Mikkelsen’s Danish accent—something quite directly looped into a running joke about his inability to pronounce “Aurora” correctly. Clearly, Dust Bunny exists out of time and place, lending itself to the fantasy element it leans hard into. As for why the monster under Aurora’s bed is a giant bunny, I couldn’t tell you—except that it rings true as a creation of a child’s imagination. Aurora admits, after all, that she wished for the monster, and I guess she got more than she bargained for out of it. There is a key moment when the hitman says, “He’s your monster, and you’re going to have to live with it.” Aurora says she wished for the hitman as well, though she catches his attention by offering him money, the source of which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that Aurora proves to be a pretty effective badass in her own right. This is a kid who not only knows where the bodies are buried but actively helps dispose of them. What more do you want?

Overall: B+

WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Is Josh O’Connor the new Pedro Pascal? This guy is everywhere! Six movies in the past three years, four of them in 2025 alone: Rebuilding (which I had intended to see but couldn’t thanks to bullshit limited release locations); The History of Sound (loved); The Mastermind (dreadfully dull); and now, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler: delightful). Even with the varied results, I don’t mind so much. O’Connor is a deeply talented actor, it’s great that he’s trying so many different types of roles, and frankly, he’s way hotter than Pedro Pescal. I said what I said!

Which leads me to writer-director Rian Johnson, whose only feature films have been Knives Out movies for the past six years (though he did direct four episodes of Poker Face in 2023). I struggle to think of another filmmaker who so consistently makes movies with star-studded ensemble casts with such success—and all of them in the same genre, no less. Ensemble films with too many big stars in them have long been known to tip toward failure, but perhaps Johnson has a new insight: on average, his casts lean more toward “great actors” than “movie stars.” Granted, we’ve long since moved into an era when being a movie star doesn’t mean what it used to.

Josh O’Connor, for example, is a mid-level “movie star” at best, but he long ago proved himself a talented and versatile actor. Even his queer roles have all been great, from 2017’s God’s Own Country (when I first noticed him) to 2025’s The History of Sound, and I’m going to go ahead and include 2024’s Challengers—O’Connor’s biggest box office earner, at least among major roles—as well. Rain Johnson has perfectly cast O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man as Father Jud Duplenticy, who gets transferred to another parish after rashly punching a rude deacon in the face (we never hear what the deacon said to him, as he is an otherwise inconsequential character whose face we don’t even see, but I was still mildly disappointed by that). Somewhat ironically given all that I have said about O’Connor thus far, Jud, being a priest, is completely sexless in this film, not just celibate but never even indicating any desires. His passions are reserved for a steadily growing hatred for the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Josh Brolin is also perfectly cast as Wicks, a complicated but blustering control freak of a man. Wicks, incidentally, is not so celibate, at least not by the strict rules of Catholicism: he regularly asks Jud to take his confession, and is constantly confessing all the times he’s masturbated, including the locations and varying techniques of it.

So this is where the ensemble cast aspect of it comes in: the inevitable murder happens, and the small number of regulars who remain loyal to Wicks’s congregation are all quickly identified as suspects: Martha the deeply devotional church lady (Glenn Close); Nat the town doctor (Jeremy Renner); Vera the lawyer (Kerry Washington); Lee the best-selling author now in a professional slump (Andrew Scott); Simone the former concert cellist rendered disabled by an undiagnosable chronic pain disorder (Cailee Spaeny); and Cy the YouTube-obsessed aspiring Republican politician (Daryl McCormack). None of these characters get a great deal of development, but that’s beside the point of the exercise in a film like this; what’s important is that each one of them gets assigned a clear motive.

And on top of all that, we get Mila Kunis as the local police chief in this small New York State town; Jeffrey Wright as the bishop who assigns Jud to Wicks’s church (Wright is always a welcome presence and he doesn’t get enough screen time here); Thomas Haden Church as Martha’s groundskeeper lover; and my favorite surprise appearance, Bridget Everett, comedian and star of HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, as a gabby construction company employee.

You may have noticed I haven’t yet even mentioned Daniel Craig. Well, now I have! We do see his face first in Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s reading a written account of what has transpired at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, which quickly cuts to that backstory as the narrative, introducing all of these characters and leading up to the murder. Craig isn’t seen at all through all this backstory, at least half an hour or more, until the police chief has called in Private Detective Benoit Blanc, he meets all of these characters in question, as well as the writer of the aforementioned account, and we finally figure out how he came to be in possession of it—in a way not quite suggested at first, by how this movie is cleverly edited.

And yes, the story and the vibe are both very close to that of 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion—which is by design. Which is to say: if you enjoyed those other two movies (and I very much did), then you will enjoy this one. They all feature effective humor, intriguing mystery, solid performances, and a big reveal at the end of who the murderer is and exactly how the deed was done. It’s formula, sure, but also the point: it’s a formula that works. And to Rain Johnson’s exceeding credit, even people who usually figure out the mystery before it’s revealed don’t do it so easily in Johnson’s films. My husband cycled through four different theories—including that all the suspects worked together to commit the murder—until the final reveal proved all his predictions had been wrong.

Wake Up Dead Man does have a few minor details that don’t make sense under scrutiny, such as local police using sirens when merely arriving for a meeting with someone. There is a quasi-meta moment when Benoit Blanc notes that they are not in a mystery fiction, even though of course they are. And, as always, your mileage may vary on Daniel Craig’s Kentucky-fried accent, which some find fun and others find ridiculous. I fall somewhere in the middle on that one, though as these movies go on, it feels sort of like an essential trademark of the series. The bottom line is that I alway have a blast watching these movies, and while I would also love to see Brian Johnson branching out into other genres again, I would happily take another five of these, so long as the quality stays consistent. So far, it has—the first film is the easy favorite, of course, as the kick-off to the series, but I found the second one nearly as delightful (though one wonders how well it will age over time, given how much of its covid-era production was worked directly into the script).

I should note that Wake Up Dead Man made me laugh quite a lot, often really hard, especially in its first hour or so. The humor certainly tapers off as the tensions rise, and I kind of missed the humor in the second half. But, being set in a Catholic church and with congregants as most of its characters, Wake Up Dead Man also weaves in themes of duty, morality, and loyalty with a nuance not quite present in the previous films, which injects the Knives Out series with a new kind of life. Rain Johnson is a consummate writer, and particularly designer of plot construction, which is the real star of all these movies. I’ve been careful not to spoil anything here, as there are unsurprisingly many plot twists (watch out for the deliberately misleading trick of Blanc saying “Why’d you do it?”). Suffice it to say that Wake Up Dead Man is every bit the entertainment mystery it is designed to be. The only true disappointment is that, even by comparison to the previous two films, its theatrical release was significantly limited, mostly confining its access to Netflix. These movies are always more fun in theaters, but the flip side is that now millions of people have instant access. So fire it up and watch it right now!

You’ll figure it out as soon as they do.

Overall: B+

JAY KELLY

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

There was a time, thirty-odd years ago, when there was a recognizable element of a “made for TV” movie. Later, twenty-odd years ago, we got a higher level of movie on TV, usually originals made for premium cable channels. Still later yet, maybe ten years ago, we moved into a recognizable original movie made for streaming platforms—largely but not limited to Netflix. There are slight variances in all of these examples, but what they all have in common is a certain tone, a certain level of production value, a certain quality of the writing. All of it was at least one step down, sometimes more, from the level of quality you might expect in a theatrical release.

Enter Jay Kelly, which feels very much like a prototypical “Netflix Original” of the 2020s era. And don’t get me wrong, there are always exceptions—indeed, in their days, there were also exceptional made-for-TV movies and premium-channel originals. But when enough of these things get made, they kind of fall into a recognizable average, and that’s the space Jay Kelly exists in. It’s a decent enough movie, but just not quite good enough to feel like it would have been worth seeing in a theater.

I realize I’m speaking like a person out of time, given the wildly changing movie landscape, the siloed nature of audience interests, and even how many truly terrible movies you can actually still see in theaters. But Jay Kelly is trying to provide the kind of “movie for adults” that used to be moderately successful in cinemas and just don’t exist there anymore. But it also falls short of what the best of those sorts of movies used to provide when they were given a chance to thrive.

And there is an unforeseen downside to the touted tendency of Netflix to give filmmakers total freedom to make whatever they want, to create a “pure vision.” It turns out, sometimes studio notes are actually good, and unchecked indulgence isn’t always all that great. In this case, it’s director and co-writer Noah Baumbach, who previously brought many Oscar nominations to a Netflix Original with Marriage Story (2019), a much better film than Jay Kelly. There was a couple of years there where Netflix was helping shepherd filmmakers to near-masterpieces.

It’s too bad, because Jay Kelly had a lot of potential, starring George Clooney in the title role as a movie star in the twilight years of his career, looking back on his life with melancholy, loneliness and regret. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), is a long-suffering and thankless friend who Jay rarely sees as anything other than someone he pays. The same goes for his publicist, Liz (Laura Dean), and to a bit of a lesser degree, his hairstylist, Candy (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach). A bunch of other recognizable faces show up: Jim Broadbent as Jay’s longtime professional mentor; Billy Crudup as Jay’s old acting school buddy; Patrick Wilson as another actor managed by Ron; even Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife—and it’s lovely to see Gerwig in front of the camera again, even if relatively briefly.

The trouble is, the script for Jay Kelly is often unnecessarily obvious, garnished with some clunky exposition, as when Ron and Liz talk about the night 19 years ago when she left him at the Eiffel Tower. They tell each other things that fill us in on the story but would never be the level of detail people would actually say to each other when recalling a shared memory.

I feel like I understand what Jay Kelly is going for, about a man both running from himself and afraid to actually be himself (it’s mentioned more than once how hard that is to do). It just misses the mark a bit. The performances are decent across the board, and Clooney is well cast in this role, even if it’s a very odd choice for a tribute event for Jay to feature retrospective clips from his film career that are all clips from George Clooney’s actual film career. What exactly are we doing here? One might assume this is a meta commentary on Clooney’s own life—right down to the first-consonant sounds of both first and last names—except for how clearly and fully fictionalized Jay Kelly and his life are. Not enough of Jay Kelly makes us think about the real-life George Clooney until this moment, and this retrospective of his career makes us think only about George Clooney and not enough about Jay.

Baumbach also makes a consistent choice regarding Jay’s reminiscences, where he will walk through a doorway into another room that turns out to be one of his memories. I always found these moments awkward and not especially well executed. In one scene, he calls one of his two grown daughters on the phone, and suddenly the daughter is walking with him through the woods—an unnecessarily foggy woods, mind you—and speaking to him face to face, even though we are to understand they are actually on the phone. I just felt Jay Kelly would have worked better without all these odd transitional flourishes.

It took a bit of time, but Jay Kelly did ultimately hold my interest; there are too many really good actors in it for it not to. That said, I have long far preferred Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor to his mostly-awful comedies, but while he is decent in Jay Kelly, his performance here falls far short of the incredibly dynamic screen presence he had in films like Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Uncut Gems (2019).

Again, this all comes back to the unchecked freedom now characteristic of, particularly Netflix Original films. It increasingly brings with it a kind of looseness that does not necessarily serve the movie. Jay Kelly has a very compelling premise and pretty solid performances, but it also would have benefitted from polishing, maybe even a bit of trimming. It has a satisfying trajectory of story beats, but this is not a movie that needed to be 132 minutes long. It features no dramatic catharsis that makes it feel worth the time investment.

Or: maybe it’s worth having on at home, and that’s exactly the point. My counterpoint, I suppose, is that this approach has done nothing over time but lower our standards. It was fine, I guess. Okay let’s watch another blandly effective entertainment that’s Up Next!

Jay Kelly, George Clooney, then and now: an actor reflects.

Overall: B

ZOOTOPIA 2

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Animation: B+

If you really want to see a movie as delightful as Zootopia (2016), nine years later, then . . . why not just watch Zootopia again? That’s what I did, and I had a blast. I nearly forgot how good it was, how clever, how consistently funny. I probably would have enjoyed Zootopia 2 more had I not watched both movies one day after the other.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy Zootopia 2; I did, generally. It’s the “generally” that I’m a little hung up on, because this new film is something that takes a clever concept and then does little more than rehash it. A ton of the gags in this film aren’t even original, but rather simply a trotting out of the hits we already saw in the first one. You might not be as prone to noticing this if you don’t watch the films back to back, but you might still notice that Zootopia 2 has a bit of old-school sequel-itis. I kept thinking about Die Hard 2, and how many characters it brought back from the first film for the sake of nothing but having us say, “Hey! That guy!”

As always, none of this is going to matter to kids. They’ll just eat this up, I’m sure. But what historically sets Disney apart from other animation is how well it works as entertainment for grownups as well as the kids. To be fair, Zootopia is still relatively entertaining for adults too, albeit in a bit more of a pandering way. Disney has just been far better at it in the past—including the past Zootopia movie, which had a sly message about unlearning prejudices and a consistently effective sense of humor at the same time. A lot of the gags here feel kind of like they would have been cut from the first film, and then just got reassembled here.

We even get a return of Shakira as the pop star Gazelle, right down to the “live concert” footage that plays with the first few minutes of the end credits. Beat for beat, Zootopia is simply the same experience as Zootopia, just without the novelty or certainly any of the originality. Granted, even the original Zootopia recalled the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood, a favorite of mine in childhood, but at least it put a new spin on the concept. There are no new spins to be found in this new film, which throws out a lot more movie reference gags for the grown-ups: a hedge maze with the iconic The Shining synthesizer score, a brief reappearance of Bellwether the sheep (Jenny Slate) behind a glass wall like The Silence of the Lambs (get it?). Unlike the first film, in which a reference to The Godather also served to move the story forward, these references exist only for their own sake.

They’re still fun, I guess. And although the relationship between Judy Hopps the bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde the fox (Jason Bateman) strangely skirts the edges of romance but consistently lands firmly in the realm of “friendship,” an inevitable rift between them and their subsequent emotional reconciliation actually got my eyes a little damp. Maybe I’m just getting as soft as these animals.

Except, here’s the “twist” in Zootopia 2: instead of a society consisting only of mammals (side note, maybe my favorite gag was when they crash a “Burning Mammal” festival), we learn of an underground society of reptiles, pushed to the edges of Zootopia a century ago, the city being tricked into thinking of them all as untrustworthy. Never mind that this is nearly identical to the rift between two factions in the first film, predator versus prey. The cartoon logic of how these animals “evolved” made more sense in the first film, but the more into the weeds it gets in this second film, the less the logic holds. Not that cartoons were ever meant to be logical, I get it! There’s still something to be said for skilled weaving of a narrative, and Zootopia 2 is just a slightly degraded copy of an original. We do get a snake voiced by Ke Huy Quan, and a beaver voiced by Fortune Feimster. The aquatic mammal borough of Zootopia proves more fun and interesting than the reptile underground.

The animation is very well rendered, if often hard to focus on with all the quick-cutting action. The plot holds okay, as we learn about “weather walls” that control separate climates for different borough/habitats of the city, while I find myself wondering how any of them can visit any other, more inhospitable environments for any real amount of time and in so doing keep a whole city humming. But then, I think too much. It’s not that deep, right? Except Zootopia 2 clearly wants it to be, what with the continued, and slightly less sly, messaging about accepting each other for who we truly are. The allegorical component remains strong in this film, it just has a comparative lack of finesse. It’s just fun enough, but unexceptional, time at the movies.

I never thought I’d be this happy about the distraction of a beaver.

Overall: B

RENTAL FAMILY

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.

Overall: B-

HAMNET

Directing: A-
Acting: A+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

The final sequence in Hamnet involves the staging of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, with Shakespeare himself (Paul Mescal) playing the part of the Ghost, and Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), at the front of the floor crowd crunched right up against the stage, having made an unannounced visit to view the play. This is a scene with a lot of extras, thankfully none of them computer-generated, and the staging—if you’ll pardon the pun—is superb. It’s not often that even the performances of the extras in a scene is impressive, and this is a testament to the directing skill of Chloé Zhao (who also directed and co-wrote the Best Picture-winning 2020 film Nomadland). Agnes becomes deeply invested in the story unfolding onstage in front of her, but so does this entire crowd, who at one point take a subtle collective action as led by Agnes, which is one of the most moving moments in the film. We do not see any of William Shakespeare’s productions up until this point, and this sequence alone makes Hamnet worth seeing, and it’s worth waiting for.

It’s also worth noting that Zhao also co-wrote Hamnet, along with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the 2020 novel of the same name—and that this story runs with a lot of historical conjecture, such as the idea that Hamlet is at all directly tied to the death of Shakespeare’s one son: Hamnet. Indeed, we are told with an opening title card that in their time, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were virtually interchangeable. This film literalizes this notion when, upon first seeing the play start, Agnes shouts at the actors “Don’t you dare say my son’s name!”

As O’Farrell and Zhao tell it, The Tragedy of Hamlet ultimately served as a way for William and Agnes to come to an understanding regarding the grieving of their son. This is reportedly the product of speculation, but in the film, it is very effective. I cam to this film armed with tissues, and it did not disappoint on that front—although I will admit to expecting to weep a bit more than I did. I still wept plenty.

The focus of Hamnet is never truly on the title character, but on how his life and death of his parents, one of whom is arguably the most famous artist ever to live in the Western World. Long before any of the children are born—and there are three; an older daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and a pair of fraternal twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes)—the story focuses on the love story between William, and Agnes, the local orphaned child with a reputation for being a witch. Hamnet only leans slightly into the witchiness of Agnes, with her insistence that she can see visions by touching people’s hands, or her deep, generational connection to the forest. She even gives birth to Susanna by herself in the woods. This, of course, is well after William and Agnes secure their betrothal, in the face of certain lack of permission by either William’s parents or Agnes’s guardian, by simply getting pregnant.

I find myself wondering how these plot threads play out in the novel, as although the film clocks in at a quite-reasonable 125 minutes, some of these details felt a little bit rushed to me. Most notably, the contempt this couple’s parents or guardian have for their beloved, which seems to have dissipated on the part of William’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), within a couple of scenes—as soon as the narrative jumps forward to the birth of Susanna. As for Agne’s stepmother, Joan (Justine Mitchell), we see her very briefly in only a few scenes, and when Agnes much later says to her very coldly, “You are not my mother, and you never were,” we have seen so little of Joan that the nastiness feels unearned.

The narrative also jumps forward from the twins’ infancy to their age at around ten, and we do not get a lot of time getting to know any of them, either—though we do get to know Hamnet himself slightly better than the others. Just enough, indeed, to get a sense of how much these children mean to their parents. Jessie Buckley’s performance of maternal grief is so stunningly visceral that I found myself wondering if she has children of her own (she has one), and Paul Mescal has kind of already made a career out of tortured interiority. These two do not express grief in the same way, and in this telling at least, it takes the writing of Hamlet to bring them back around to each other

Hamnet is more than anything a love story, and that is indeed where it shines. The performances are phenomenal, especially those of Buckley and Mescal, but really across the board—right down to the aforementioned extras in the theater watching Hamlet in the final sequence of the film. And although I’m sure it would help deepen the appreciation, you need not have a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s work to appreciate this story, or indeed even how Hamlet is used therein. Shakespeare himself was well known for writing “a play within a play,” which is effectively what is happening here—quite similarly using the play as subtext. By the end, though, it becomes the text, in a way deftly executed, so that even with the quibbles I had with the plotting, I felt emotionally cleansed.

Agnes is deeply moved, and so are we.

Overall: A-

ETERNITY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I really enjoyed Eternity, but I also have a lot of nitpicks. Let’s go through them all!

But let’s back up a step, to the premise, which is that our three main characters spend time in a place called “Junction,” where they have as long as a week to decide a single environment (or world, or universe, whatever you want to call it) in which to spend eternity. The twist, and the whole reason for this story, is that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is also faced with another agonizing decision: whether to spend eternity with the first husband, Luke (Callum Turmer), who died in the Korean war, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), with whom Joan enjoyed 65 years of happy marriage.

The first death we see is Larry’s, and it’s the circumstances of this death that is my first major nitpick. It happens at a gender reveal party for one of their great grandchildren. A gender reveal party? Really? To be fair, the script, by Patrick Cunnane and director David Freyne, passingly acknowledges how stupid these parties are: “People die at these things!” says Larry as an old man, played by Barry Primus (Joan as an old woman is played by Betty Buckley). There is even a bit of a callback to this gag when a later couple met in Junction is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident at a gender reveal party. Still, the deliberately inoffensive jokes aside, the use of a gender reveal party in the opening sequence of this film both reflects and participates in the preposterous normalization of "gender reveal” parties. These things are both pointless and blithely presumptuous, and might as well be called “Genital Identification Parties.” But nobody in this movie dares say that.

We learn on the car ride to the party, before Larry dies, that Joan has cancer, and is waiting until after the party to tell the rest of the family. When Larry wakes up in Junction, he’s the first character we follow there, and at first the story is just from his perspective. But, we already know that Joan is not far behind, and basically the second act involves a shift in perspective to hers. Not long after that, we learn that Luke has been waiting for Joan in Junction for the past 67 years.

The rules of how things work in Junction are both undeniably entertaining and often nonsensical. This film clearly owes its existence to the widely loved (I always thought it was just fine) 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, except instead of a character pleading his case for having lived a life worthy of spending eternity in a better place, here characters merely have to choose where to spend eternity—and in this case, with whom.

Why time means anything in Junction at all escapes me, but it very much does: “clients” are assigned an Afterlife Coordinator (“AC”) as a guide to help them choose, but they get one week in which to do it. The people who work these jobs in Junction, whether they are ACs or janitors or bartenders, are people who have chosen, for various reasons, not to go to any eternity at all. Some of them just enjoy helping others and that gives them a feeling of purpose. Some are waiting for their beloved to arrive, as in Luke, who has waited there for 67 years. It’s a little weird that measurements of time should be so important in Junction when it means nothing in eternity, but whatever.

The thing is, in the film Eternity, it’s all the scenes that take place in Junction that are really fun and compelling—and, crucially, contains all of the surprisingly effective humor in this film. Now, it also makes no sense that the system here should be so modeled on capitalism, with representatives from countless “Worlds” trying to sell it to people passing through Junction—not with money, but just simple persuasion, I guess. We see characters walking past countless booths (or in some cases, watching commercials) for different “Worlds,” from Paris Land to Smokers World to 1920s Germany “with 100% less Nazis.” Larry’s inclination is toward Beach World, and Joan’s is toward Mountain Town—basically the same argument they had in the car on the way to the party. I loved seeing all these examples of eternities, and when I saw booths for Queer World and Studio 54 World side by side, I thought: I’d have a hard time choosing between those two. That said, why does this system only have a selection of offerings created by someone else? Can’t we just create one of our own? What if I want to spend eternity in Andrew-Garfield-and-Timothée-Chalamet-Sandwich World?

Junction is also made much more fun by the supporting characters who are Larry’s and Joan’s ACs, respectively: Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early). These two are very invested in their clients but also have a sexual past together, which is an odd turn in this film given how openly and obviously queer John Early is. He does marvel at the handsomeness of Luke, a running gag in the script, but he later explains to Anna that he could never do polyamory because “I am a one-woman man.” Oh really, John Early? The oddest thing about that exchange is that it is the one time in Eternity that polyamory is brought up, and it’s only within the context of Ryan and Anna’s relationship. Why does no one ever bring up the idea to Joan, Larry and Luke? Couldn’t they at least test out Polyamory World?

It seems like that’s the only thing that could be a suitable compromise for all three of them. Why should Joan have to choose? Isn’t eternity supposed to be the place they choose in which they’ll be happiest? This script does, amusingly, acknowledge how one eternity could quickly get tedious: enforcement officials are constantly running down people trying to escape the eternity they have chosen, one of whom shouts, “Museum World is so boring!” But would not any eternity be so? Whether it’s an eternity at the beach or in the mountains?

Indeed, there’s a ton of detail in Eternity that is really easy to pick apart, not least of which is the fair amount of time spent in different eternities in the second half of the film. These scenes are constructed so that characters can reflect on whether or not they made the right choice, but when the backdrop is just serene mountains or an inexplicably overcrowded beach (why would there be a limit on the amount of beach that can be shared for eternity?), Eternity, as a film, instantly just becomes far less interesting, compelling, or fun. It’s less fun without Early or Randolph around. And the technique for rendering the “Archive” building in each Eternity where characters can view replayed memories from their lives is mystifying: they see themselves as tangible people, but in a sort of diorama box with the environment of these memories rendered in large hand drawn backdrops. I can’t tell if this was a legitimately artistic choice or if it was a production cost saving measure. It sure felt like the latter,

Eternity is the kind of movie that is undeniably entertaining but also does not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I laughed a lot the entire time the film was set at Junction, from the many sight gags to the delightful performances of both Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early. This made me happy to have seen this movie even though none of it really makes any sense.

Overall: B

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Sisu: Road to Revenge opens so similarly to the original 2022 Finnish film Sisu that, for a brief moment, I thought I had misunderstood something and somehow found myself at a rerelease of that film. The first thing you see is a title card offering the definition of the word Sisu: “a Finnish word that cannot be translated. It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost.” And in both films, this is followed by voiceover narration as we see an animated map of Europe—in the case of Sisu, we learn it is 1944 as the Second World War is coming to an end; in Sisu: Road to Revenge, it is two years later, 1946, shortly after the end of the war. We learn of the land area of Finland that was ceded to the Soviet Union, forcing nearly half a million Finnish people to relocate—and that this was the homeland of our hero, Aatami (Jorma Tommila).

Once these introductory scenes are out of the way, the two films then move forward in fairly different ways. In Sisu, it began with quiet serenity while Aatami prospects for gold, ultimately interrupted with approaching Nazi carnage. In Road to Revenge, we see Aatami driving a huge truck across the border, where he finds the home of his family who was murdered by a Soviet Red Army officer. He commences with dismantling the lumber of the house, marking the pieces as needed for reassembly, and stacks it on the bed of the aforementioned huge truck.

You could say there is a sort of serenity to this early sequence as well, except that writer-director Jalmari Helander, who wrote and directed both of these movies, moves through it much more quickly. And, just as in the first film, sequences are divided up into “chapters,” most of which last no longer than a single set piece.

And here is where I really get to the point: what surprises me most about Sisu: Road to Revenge is how it’s gotten a more positive response, from both critics and audiences, than the first film. The best I can guess is that people find the action sequences, and the delightfully inventive violence that defines both films, to be even more exciting than before. For me, though, there’s something about the time the first film takes before shifting gears, and the specific tone from an international perspective that gave it a novelty that by definition cannot exist with a sequel.

There’s a bit of an irony in how I would call this a rare instance of it being actually advisable to watch the original film right before going right into watching the sequel. Because even though the films are set two years apart, they very much feel like the same movie. Helander reportedly was very deliberate in keeping the run times of these films at a tight ninety minutes because he is “not a fan of 3-hour epics” (according to IMDb.com). And yet, you could easily watch these two films back to back for a solid three hours and feel like you’re watching a single, epic story of wildly implausible but deeply entertaining revenge violence.

Indeed, in Road to Revenge, we do get a villain as the character who murdered Aatami’s family—Red Army officer Yeagor Dragunov, played by American actor Stephen Lang. This actor is the guy perhaps most notably recognized as the primary villain in both Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, except in those movies he’s super jacked, and in Road to Revenge, his character having just been released from a prison in Siberia, he’s pretty scrawny—almost emaciated. But, the Soviets are eager to dispatch this mysterious man who has killed hundreds of men, and so they release Dragunov to “clean up the mess he made.” This leads to an inevitable showdown.

Both Sisu movies make the curious choice of shooting nearly all the dialogue in English—evidently as a means of broadening the audience potential of a film out of Finland. Lang gets by far the most lines in Road to Revenge, presumably meant to be in Russian but performed, evidently for our sake, in English. A lot of his lines are super contrived or outright stupid, to such an extent that they would have played better in Russian with English subtitles. As an evident nod of respect to Helander’s homeland, any dialogue by Finnish characters is indeed performed in Finnish with English subtitles. In Road to Revenge, this only occurs with two lines at the end of the film. Even then, Aatami himself says nothing, as a defining characteristic of both of these films is that he is a man of few words. He says only a couple of lines at the end of the original Sisu; he makes it through the entirety of Road to Revenge without saying anything at all.

Mind you, it’s pretty easy to say that if you liked Sisu, you will certainly like Sisu: Road to Revenge—especially as the latter gets to the action a lot more swiftly, as is par for the course with sequels like this. There’s a pretty great chase sequence with Aatami and several armored men on motorcycles that is basically Indiana Jones meets Mad Max. As always, Aatami sustains a great deal of injury, but a big part of the point of these films is how the blind desire for vengeance is what keeps him alive even in the direst of circumstances, even as he regularly achieves the humanly impossible, let alone the implausible.

Sisu is basically Finland’s version of a superhero franchise, albeit one that feels as though it was filtered through the sensibility of Quentin Tarantino. There are moments in Sisu that are quite emotional, though, and it never lets us forget that Aatami is still grieving the lost of his entire family at the hands of the enemy. This man does not see Nazis or Soviets as individuals, but as parts of a collective entity who wronged him. This makes it easy to root for his often gruesome killing of soldier after soldier. This happens in Road to Revenge, but of course, all as part of his path to Dragonov. This culminates in a pretty fun sequence of Aatami hacking and gunning his way through cars of men on a train headed back to Siberia.

A quick note on the special effects: some of it is very impressive in this movie, particularly wide shots of fighter jets attempting to gun down Aatami in his truck full of lumber. Other times, it’s very obvious CGI, such as the wide shots of the aforementioned train traveling through the night. At least it’s never overtly bad, and its use only ever serves the story, such as it is. This is a movie made to satisfy viewer bloodlust, and on that level, it delivers with a clever hand.

You missed a spot!

Overall: B

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

Anyone with a thing for juicy family dramas should look no further than Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his similarly excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021). The person he cast in the starring role is also the same in both films: the wonderful Renate Reinsve, here playing Nora Borg, an accomplished stage actress in Oslo, where she lives in a home that has been in her family for generations.

If I had any minor nitpick about Sentimental Value, it would be how no one ever talks about the hugeness of this house, which appears to have three stories and an unspecified but certainly large number of rooms. The generational history is discussed as far back as Nora’s great great grandparents, but I don’t recall any family iteration being larger than a family of four: two parents and two kids. Clearly more recent generations aquired the house through inheritance; maybe earlier generations actually made it a multi-generational home? I kept wondering how the hell any of them kept it clean. None of these generations are shown with a housekeeper.

Surely it would make sense that such a house would be easier to afford in the era of World War II—today, in the United States at least, this house would have been converted into an apartment complex long ago. Granted, this is Norway, and a lot of things work differently there—although the simple tenets of capitalism infect every corner of the globe. And, to be sure: this house figures prominently in the plot of Sentimental Value, a beautiful repository for collective memory and generational trauma, from Nora’s grandmother’s Nazi imprisonment and subsequent suicide inside the house, to Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, also excellent) witnessing the volatility of their parents’ marriage until their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), leaves and spends the better part of the rest of their lives estranged from them.

Sentimental Value opens shortly after the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother, a character we really never get to know. This is about their relationship with their father, a once-famous director who has not made a film in 15 years. But, he has now written an incredible script, with the lead part tailor made for Nora, who wants nothing to do with it. Searching for other options, Gustav turns to an American actress he meets at a local film festival: Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning in a really tricky part that she nails. Rachel is curious about the deep sadness of the suicidal character she’s playing, and Gustave has to tell her more than once that it’s not about his mother. Meanwhile, he asks Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora. (And incidentally, Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve bear an uncanny resemblance. If not for the different accents, they could more believably play sisters than the sisters we actually see onscreen here.)

What Gustav has written is highly fictionalized but still has clear similarities to his own life and family—and this is where we return, yet again, to the house. Gustav wants to shoot the film in the family home. He also wants to use his young grandson, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, the only cast member who is clearly not a practiced actor, just like the character), in the production—just like he once did Agnes, in a previous World War II-era film. Agnes was a great screen presence at the time, but did not pursue acting as a career as Nora did. Gustav, ever the undependable dad, complains of his dislike for live theater, and so never comes to Nora’s plays.

All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.

Gustav is a man who can’t help who he is, and doesn’t really know how to change—certainly not now at the age of 70. But, over time he uses this new script of his to convey how he has an uncanny understanding of Nora in particular, the daughter he wrote it for. In the end, it is through their art that they finally find a way to connect, and this is the subtle but very sweet note on which the story ends. Sentimental Value takes a sort of scenic route through its themes, never exactly a thrill of an experience but one with a finesse that stays with you.

A father-daughter relationship not quite like others you’ve seen.

Overall: A-