This is a best picture race full of ambitious ideas and big swings. A Trump-baiting sanctuary city saga. A continent-crossing Jewish picaresque fantasy. A Brazilian B-movie-tinged paranoid period thriller. A loopy alien-invasion conspiracy headtrip. A giant, roaring motorsport epic. Monsters. Vampires. Railroad-building. Shakespeare. And, erm, a drama about an actor’s daddy issues.
But if Sentimental Value seems to you the least essential of this years’s nominees, then, well, you don’t know Sentimental Value. From that familiar-sounding subject matter, the film’s Danish-Norwegian co-writer and director, Joachim Trier, has crafted something grand and sprawling: a family saga spiralling across decades and generations, spliced with a movie about moviemaking. It’s a film that churns and roils emotionally like Bergman, but – as with Trier’s last one, The Worst Person in the World – tears into heavy themes with a springiness, even a playfulness. And no other Oscar nominee provides such a showcase for performance, with four meaty parts for its terrific leads – all also Oscar-nominated – to chomp on.
