DD: While he was good last year with The Brutalist and Anora headlining the year’s best films, with Emilia Perez, maybe The Substance and Conclave figuring in the mix, our film critic HJ says Year 2025 is a much better year, in fact it has been simply stellar. He’s not confining himself to a 10 Best list, because there were way more than 10 that could be on anyone’s list. Harlan?
HJ: Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which started at Cannes and played both Toronto and the New York Film Festival, has the great young Dane/Norwegian director working again with his actress, Renate Reinsve, the star of Trier’s 2021 Oscar-winning The Worst Person in the World, and Stellan Skarsgard. Having made the short list for Best Foreign Film at the upcoming Oscars as Norway’s entry, Sentimental Value is about the rift in a family between a legendary film director and his grown daughters, one of whom, Reinsve, is a rising actress.
About an old king of cinema seeking to engage his daughter to make a comeback film, Sentimental Value enters Bergman territory in its observation, delicacy, and wistful recognition about family wounds in the family business of filmmaking that is meant to heal them.
Things come to a head when unable to persuade her to act in the film, he imports a blonde, young American star, Elle Fanning, who projects a superficial depth that triggers Reinsve.
It flat out deserved the Palme d’Or at Cannes, where the jury gave it the runner-up prize instead and garlanded Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident with the Palme. It’s a good film but not the best film to be sure, and the jury must’ve wanted to protect Panahi at home from the mullahs who have jailed him.
There is no better film this year than Sentimental Value, there are others that in their own way I loved as much.
Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, which won the Audience Award at the 50th Toronto Film Festival in September, drops us in on the 1580’s courtship and marriage near Stratford on Avon between Will, a young Latin tutor and failed apprentice and son of a glovemaker, and Agnes, held to be the latest in a line of forest witches—whom we recognize as simply a strong woman 400 years ahead of her time. It is almost not until the end of this two-hour film that anyone says Will‘s last name, Shakespeare, and we understand that Agnes is the interchangeable name of Anne Hathaway, his wife.
This too is a story about the making of a play. We know it as Hamlet, set also in Denmark. We are so keen to go to it as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies about kings and power, that Zhao disarms and devastates us by realizing the backstory of it as a work of paralysis over the loss of Will and Agnes’ son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal as the playwright -- playfully working out verses that will live forever in say Romeo and Juliet, for instance, but start as fodder for his three children putting on skits in the backyard -- and Jessie Buckley, as his witchy wife who can read the tea leaves, give career defining performances. Maggie O’Farrell who co-wrote from her novel, handed the film off to Zhao, whose earlier films were about paralysis. You can draw a line in the 43 year-old Zhao’s development from Rider in 2017 about rodeo riders, paralyzed, through Nomadland, the Oscar winning film in the plague year 2020 with Frances McDormand as a woman in her 60s wandering American byways, to Hamnet. Zhao is now a front rank, generational storyteller –she is produced in Hamnet in part by Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg -- whose topic across films is what paralyzes us, great and small, and what we do to restart.
I’m also compelled to talk about Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has swept all the critics groups as best film of the year, and looks like a lock on a number of Oscars. I confess I didn’t love it, but everybody else does, and here’s why: it’s a pure Hollywood pinball game with all the satirical markings of an indie turned major filmmaker bringing together a big cast of cartoonish American archetypes taken from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, set in the middle of the Reagan years, which Pynchon thought was about as authoritarian corrupt as we’d ever get. Well, ha Pynchon!, wherever you are, Anderson has made an overbroad but fast-paced, slapstick, black comedy from your mad book about the White Supremacist Christian Nationalist takeover. The film has mightily ticked off the Trump crime syndicate big time, calling it an ad for left wing terrorism. It didn’t help that it opened just after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a white, bomb-making, beta-male house-husband – how’s that for a combination?-- out to rescue his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) from the likes of Sean Penn as a bowlegged, pants-full, crackpot, rogue Colonel named Lockjaw with a sweet tooth for lavatory sex with Perfidia, DiCaprio’s wife, a hot black revolutionary woman on the lam, played by Teyana Taylor. Benicio del Toro wanders through as a barely bothered, laid back Latino sensei in a faceoff of American maleness--Del Toro as the Good, DiCaprio as the Butt, and Sean Penn as the Ugly, all ricocheting off one another as pawns of the real power in a country coming apart at the seams, starting at the US Mexican border.
Anderson has a legacy of mixing the serious, the profane, the satirical and the devil in previous films, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Licorice Pizza, Punch Drunk Love, and Phantom Thread, which I loved along with The Master and There Will Be Blood.
One Battle After Another sidestepped all the festivals and went straight into a theatre near you from Warner Bros, now under attack itself. It has bewitched critics, many of whom have called it the film of the year and the one to beat. But the true fantasy of the film is not really the death grip that the Crazy Right has on the country 40 years after that sweet, old Reagan but in conjuring up a Leftwing group of activists who fail but who do something like actually put up a fight. Shades of the 1960s! I saw One Battle in its big Vista Vision format at Regal Union Square in NYC, and I’d go for as big a screen as you can find, if the holiday vibe gets old, and you can sneak in some loaded eggnog.
Other titles to love – write these down – the simply fabulous Kokuho, Nouvelle Vague, and Marty Supreme – all three meta-movies about the making of art, as in opera, film, and ping pong. And Train Dreams, Sinners, Eephus, Blue Moon, Rental Family, and Sirat which, speaking of the end of the world, takes you there and stops your heart cold. Don’t miss any of those films at theatres, or down by the old mill, streaming .
You can see more of Harlan’s best films of 2025 at talkcinema.com
