Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: quiet grief in cinema

  • 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

  • Train Dreams (2025)

    A somber meditation on solitude, memory, and the slow passing of a life.

    Train Dreams

    Train Dreams may be one of the most somber movies ever made. For comparison, I thought of films like Bringing Out the Dead, Palindromes, and Synecdoche, New York—all famously bleak works that offer little to no emotional reprieve. This film is quieter, sadder, and somehow lonelier still.

    It captures the immensity of solitude: what it feels like to be briefly, modestly happy; to watch that happiness erode; and then to wake up one day and realize the world has kept moving without you—that you may be the only truly sad person left in it. The performances are restrained and affecting, communicating grief and endurance without overt dramatics.

    Still, the film’s devotion to mood comes at a cost. It often feels less like a story unfolding than an emotional state being sustained, and at times it nearly forgets to become a story at all.

    8/10