Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value arrived in 2025 and won three European Film Awards including Best Film and Best Director. It reunites Trier with his frequent collaborators Renate Reinsve (the centre of The Worst Person in the World) and Stellan Skarsgård, and was co-written with Trier's long-time screenwriter Eskil Vogt. The film completes what Trier has framed as his Oslo Trilogy, after Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World.

Reinsve plays Nora, a successful theatre actress whose semi-estranged father (Skarsgård's Gustav, a once-celebrated film director now decades into a slow career decline) wants her to take the lead role in his comeback film, an autobiographical script he has been carrying for forty years. The script is, transparently, about her mother. The film follows the months of negotiation, refusal, and partial reconciliation that follow, while a younger sister (an extraordinary newcomer) navigates the family's emotional weather without the protective armour her older sister has spent her career building.

Trier's interest in inherited emotional debt (what families pass down without intending to) is sharper here than in his previous work. Skarsgård gives one of the great late-career performances; the film operates in Trier's characteristic register of patient observation, building scenes around small gestures and offscreen weight rather than direct confrontation. Critically rapturous on release; widely considered Trier's most fully realised film.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most emotionally intelligent European film of 2025, and Trier at the peak of his powers. Renate Reinsve's lead performance is among the most-discussed in recent European cinema, building on her César and Cannes recognition for The Worst Person in the World three years earlier.