Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: movies

  • If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

    A minor masterpiece of stress, shame, and the feeling that reality is beginning to warp.

    The way Rose Byrne is shot and edited in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes her feel like an uncredited fifth character in Requiem for a Dream. If she were in that movie, audiences would be asking where her drugs are—but here, she needs none. Her mental illness behaves like a drug anyway, distorting time and flattening reality. She sees a therapist, though she is one herself. It makes you wonder: is this what my therapist is like when they’re not talking to me?

    Linda’s life collapses quite literally when a hole opens in her apartment ceiling—possibly from flooding, faulty plumbing, or maybe an alien in the walls. The film never clarifies, because Linda can’t. Her grip on cause and effect is slipping. At the same time, she is responsible for caring for her daughter, who can technically eat but refuses food because it feels “squishy,” and who is graded daily on how much she consumes. The entire household revolves around a single goal: getting her weight up to fifty pounds. Linda is never alone, yet utterly abandoned.

    Byrne carries the entire film, delivering a performance built on quiet humiliation and sustained dread. Linda isn’t heroic or admirable; she’s exhausted, brittle, and increasingly convinced she is failing at everything she is supposed to do well. Everyone else feels like a walk-on cameo. Conan O’Brien actually acts, briefly, and his presence reminded me of Dylan Baker in Requiem for a Dream: when someone is unraveling, the most others will do for them is ask a few questions and then discreetly step away.

    For a first feature, director Mary Bronstein shows impressive control. This could easily have been an amateurish mess—a pile of anxiety with no shape—but instead it becomes a low-budget, quietly devastating minor masterpiece. Byrne somehow landed a role most actresses would have killed for, had they known what Bronstein was after. Onscreen, it feels uncomfortably familiar.

    This is what I felt like during COVID.

    8/10

  • Sentimental Value (2025)

    Family ily estrangement, artistic legacy, and the limits of self-mythology.

    Sentimental Value (2025) review

    Sentimental Value is another deceptively slight movie about coping with tragic loss, but one that feels far more likely to linger. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a Lars von Trier–like director who hasn’t made a film in over a decade and now feels pressure to deliver one final artistic statement before he dies. His daughters have long since stopped needing him, and the distance feels permanent. Gustav is the kind of man who only loves punishing, perverse cinema—to the extent that he thinks DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher would be appropriate gifts for a twelve-year-old’s birthday.

    Movies about filmmakers rarely thrill me—they tend to be self-congratulatory, and therefore less honest—but this one is handled with restraint and surprising humility. The central question cuts deep: how do you convince anyone your story is worth hearing when you’ve spent a lifetime showing no interest in listening to others? Elle Fanning plays one of his collaborators, and even she seems uncertain whether this man’s vision deserves her faith. And honestly: why isn’t she already regarded as one of the finest actors of her generation?

    Sentimental Value comes and goes for me a little. It says something real, and I don’t doubt that it matters, but it didn’t stay with me in quite the way The Worst Person in the World did, which felt like the movie I’d want all my friends to watch when I die. That film felt big—about terminal illness, infidelity, and the stories people tell themselves about their own lives. Sentimental Value feels smaller by comparison, more about famous people having problems that will probably never apply to me. My boyfriend loves it. I admired it. I’m just not sure how much I’ll think about it later.

    8.5/10