Sentimental Value
Neon | Release Date: November 7, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
86
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
41
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The TimesTom ShoneJan 8, 2026
Reinsve seems to give nothing away and yet there’s not a scene she’s in where we’re not clued into Nora’s emotions. The acting is almost invisible. Nora, it becomes clear, is the mirror image of her father: giving free rein to her emotions only under the cover of the art. Read full review
100
Original-CinKaren GordonNov 13, 2025
Sentimental Value, one of the year’s best films, is an absorbing, beautifully drawn family drama that walks lightly, but goes deep. Read full review
100
The Travers TakePeter TraversNov 7, 2025
The acting could not be better in this new film landmark spiked with laughs that can suddenly—or maybe not for hours or even days later—leave you choking with tears. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearNov 7, 2025
What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours. Read full review
100
The Associated PressLindsey BahrNov 3, 2025
It’s a tall task to follow up a smash like “The Worst Person in the World,” but “Sentimental Value” rises to the occasion: Mature, sharp, bittersweet and maybe even a little hopeful. Read full review
100
The Daily BeastEsther ZuckermanSep 9, 2025
Though Sentimental Value is about the use of art as a tool for communication, it’s not so trite a movie to say that art heals all wounds. But it’s also not a cynical film. Once again, Trier defies convention by finding grace that is so profound it can be walloping. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 8, 2025
It’s a movie that sneaks up on you like great fiction, blending theme and character in a way that allows it to live in your mind after you see it, rolling around what it means to both the people in it and your own life. Read full review
100
The Film StageLuke HicksMay 22, 2025
The characters are so fleshed-out, the diction so lived-in, the backstories and present stories so engaging. Their conversations seem less like scripted scenes than real moments lucky to have been captured. In creating a relatively small and recognizable film that can feel revelatory, Trier shows sleight of hand that could only belong to a young veteran at the height of his career. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 22, 2025
This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers. Read full review
100
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannMay 22, 2025
Trier captures so much while saying so little and, in many ways, Sentimental Value feels like the film he's been building toward his entire career. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 22, 2025
Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible. Read full review
100
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 22, 2025
To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis. Read full review
91
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodMay 22, 2025
As with much of his previous work, Trier is masterful with delicate, humanist moments. Read full review
90
The RevealKeith PhippsNov 24, 2025
Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions. Read full review
90
SlateDana StevensNov 7, 2025
Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithNov 6, 2025
Sentimental Value is an affecting look into a fractured family. Art and domestic life intertwine with each other, inform each other and perhaps support each other more than is at first apparent, leading to an ending that provides a satisfying union of the two realms. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 6, 2025
Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerNov 5, 2025
A story about home, inheritance, and fiction’s ability to reveal truths capable of bringing alienated individuals together, it’s a tumultuous, moving triumph. Read full review
90
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 22, 2025
Sentimental Value is yet another rich and humane look at existence from a filmmaker wise to the endless nuance of being a person in the world, for better or worst. Read full review
90
TheWrapChase HutchinsonMay 22, 2025
Following a failed father and filmmaker attempting to connect with his daughters by turning the former family home into a set, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a subtle yet sweeping tapestry of art, family and connection that takes the breath away. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreMay 22, 2025
Reinsve, with that phenomenally open, oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesNov 20, 2025
Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJan 20, 2026
Reinsve and Skarsgard work repressed magic in each scene they share—exploding on occasion, but still never directly confronting the deeper issues involved. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 23, 2025
Sentimental Value offers a powerful story about fathers and daughters, roads not taken, the thirst for redemption, and the path toward reconciliation. Read full review
88
Washington PostMoncia HesseNov 20, 2025
The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJan 2, 2026
Lilleaas and Reinsve go up against each other with nuanced vigour. Fanning, though not suggesting any real film star I can think of, has fun spreading trivial glamour about the place. Skarsgard deserves the Oscar he may well receive. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyJan 2, 2026
Sentimental Value doesn’t argue that art heals all wounds, but that it’s sometimes the only recourse for honest expression. Read full review
80
EmpireEmily MaskellDec 23, 2025
Ultimately, overlapping notions of family, cinema and healing are neatly tied up in an arresting and heartrendingly gentle finale that will leave an ache in your chest. Stripping dialogue and editing flourishes away, Sentimental Value’s final note is a showstopper. Read full review
80
Little White LiesHannah StrongDec 22, 2025
Skarsgård is the best he’s been in years as a father fundamentally unable to articulate himself in any way other than his work, and oblivious as to why his daughters feel such frustration with him for a lifetime of distance, and there’s keen wisdom in Sentimental Value’s observation of the gulf between who our parents are and who we wish they were. Read full review
80
Time OutChristina NewlandDec 3, 2025
It’s a slowly unfurling film, full of words and recriminations in the manner of Scandi master Ingmar Bergman, but with a good deal more dark humour. Read full review
80
Film ThreatBradley GibsonDec 1, 2025
Trier has created a masterwork, with layers of human drama and frailty (on a budget of less than $8M), soaring to the heights of unearned optimism only to crash into the inevitably of mortality. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 7, 2025
Sentimental Value is a drama about one family, but it could also be a message in a bottle for the greater world. Larkin, a proto-punk, poked fun at the way humans, just by procreating, pass their worst traits to their children and beyond, through infinity. Trier has much more hope, and his tender punk manifesto echoes something the English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller said more than three centuries ago: Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 22, 2025
While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, “The Worst Person in the World,” this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 22, 2025
On its surface, the film may touch on the familiar theme of how artists draw from their own lives, but Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgard bring incredible tenderness to a story that is ultimately about what children and parents never say to one another — and whether those lifelong silences can ever be broken. Read full review
80
Paste MagazineJason GorberMay 22, 2025
Thanks to Trier’s visual flourishes, and the carefully constructed script co-written with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, the many metaphors of the handsome edifice connect brilliantly to the emotional turmoil of its occasional inhabitants. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonNov 13, 2025
We’re asked to believe in the healing power of art, and the performances sell the idea well enough for us to commit. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerOct 6, 2025
Sentimental Value successfully synthesizes metaphor and nuanced character drama to convey the way suffering ripples outward—even if it’s hard to shake the feeling that, like its protagonist, it should let us in a little deeper. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineDavid RobbAug 12, 2025
The film’s multi-layered structure supports a familiar but often profoundly affecting tale of intergenerational family conflict. Read full review
70
IONCINEMA.comNicholas BellNov 6, 2025
Where Sentimental Value tends to feel somewhat overwhelmed is with an extensive amount of running time spent on the fussiness of Borg’s production with Rachel, treating us to publicity (the film is being financed by Netflix), which sometimes bogs down the pace and distracts us from the beating heart of the film. Read full review
70
ColliderTherese LacsonMay 22, 2025
Trier's understanding of complex family relationships and his ability to portray them honestly make this yet another win for him and a solid entry into his filmography. Read full review
69
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzNov 11, 2025
It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty. Read full review
60
The TimesEd PottonJan 2, 2026
Skarsgard and Reinsve are excellent as two damaged people who are only able to open up when they’re working, but you yearn for the film itself to open up. It’s an intriguing premise, stylishly executed but sometimes lacking a bit of heart. Read full review
60
The New YorkerJustin ChangNov 12, 2025
Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonNov 6, 2025
There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 22, 2025
It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too. Read full review
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