Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value is a tender, richly layered family drama from Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who reunites with his Worst Person in the World star Renate Reinsve and co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt. A study of estrangement, art, and inherited pain set largely within a single storied Oslo house, it confirmed Trier's standing as one of world cinema's most humane and precise storytellers.

Reinsve plays Nora, an acclaimed stage actress who, with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), is drawn back into the orbit of their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), a once-celebrated filmmaker mounting his first project in fifteen years. When Gustav offers Nora the lead in a deeply personal film inspired by his own mother's wartime trauma and she refuses, he casts a visiting American movie star (Elle Fanning) instead, setting off a delicate reckoning between a father and the daughters he failed. The house itself, thick with memory, becomes the story's quiet fourth character.

The film premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix after a reported nineteen-minute standing ovation, and went on to earn some of the year's strongest reviews and a sweep of awards attention, including nine Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe win for Skarsgard. It became the first Norwegian film to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It is streaming on Hulu.