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Sentimental Value - The Popcorn Junkies Movie Review (Spoilers)

·18 min·1 clip

The review’s clearest payoff is the final wide shot on set, with Gustav and Nora still unable to connect.

The episode opens by putting Sentimental Value into the awards-season mix. It identifies the film as a Norwegian project from Joachim Trier, the director of The Worst Person in the World. The host notes that it stars Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Lilias, and American actress Ellie Fanning. The review treats it as a movie that keeps coming up in awards chatter, which is part of why it is being discussed now, and points out that it was nominated for the Golden Globes. From there, it moves into the emotional core of the story. Gustav sits at the center of a family that has learned to live around him more than with him. His relationship with his daughter comes across as tense, guarded, and full of old damage. She wants distance from him and closeness to him at the same time. The review treats that contradiction as one of the film's strongest ideas. Love and dislike are tangled together in a way that never really settles. Agnes, the other sister, is introduced as the softer, slower counterweight. She gives the movie a different rhythm and a different emotional temperature. The discussion then turns to the film's retrospective material. A film Gustav made years earlier becomes part of the story's emotional machinery. The girl in that earlier film turns out to be Agnes. That detail gives Agnes a strange double life inside the story. She is both part of the family's present and a keeper of its past. The episode follows her research into the Norwegian resistance movement during World War Two. That work becomes a bridge between the family story and the grandmother's history. The review suggests this is where the film starts to widen. Gustav's movie is not really only about his career or his latest project. It becomes an exploration of his mother and the burden she carried. The episode keeps returning to the idea that family damage does not begin with the people in the room. It is already moving from the generation before. The review treats memory as something inherited, repeated, and passed along without anyone meaning for it to happen. By the end, the film is framed as a serious, layered family drama with enough emotional pressure to justify the spoiler-heavy conversation around it. The episode stays brisk, blunt, and focused on character more than plot mechanics.

As heard by us

A sharp, spoiler-heavy family-drama review that keeps finding the ache under the prestige polish.

Sentimental Value is a polished awards-season family drama that keeps finding the bruise under its own elegance. The piece treats Joachim Trier's film as a story about a father and his daughters struggling to find language for one another, while keeping the central idea clear:…

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For the spoiler verdict on Joachim Trier's awards-season family drama Sentimental Value.

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