Sure as death and taxes, the Academy Award nominations are once again upon us. The big news: Sinners has obliterated the previous record for previous nominations. Time now being what it is — some previously unknown, unknowable glue-trap of speed and paralysis — a lot of time has passed since the movie debuted and, I see now, I wrote so rapturously about it. Hard to say whether its omission from my year-end favorites list is due to recency bias, chemical interference, world events or my own degrading cognitive capacity, but its unprecedented reception by the Academy has given me pause. I’ve certainly thought about Sinners since last April, haven’t I? Reminded now, I remember the exhilaration of the experience of it, but somehow it hasn’t lived in my memory like it seems it should, and I can’t say why. Regardless, it is a bracing development for a relatively young filmmaker like Ryan Coogler to be recognized for a creation wholly his own, moreover one that has vampires and Tommy guns in it.
In fact, looking over the ten Best Picture nominees, I’m struck by the depth and breadth of their variety, and more than a little surprised/validated by the number of genre-leaning entries. The broadening of the Academy seems to have succeeded in breathing lively new life into the proceedings (including, I’m told, the ceremony itself) and dispelling some of the stuffiness with which they have often been burdened. Though Hamnet does seem to have something of the Merchant-Ivory about it; haven’t seen it. (A friend attributed my disinterest in Chloe Zhao’s latest to antipathy toward what he called “chick flicks,” but beyond questions of authorship, I have little to no interest in William Shakespeare’s backstory; this includes my borderline contempt for 1998 crowd-favorite Shakespeare in Love.)
If nothing else, the nominations are an occasion to explore the movies that the industry has agreed upon as the year’s best. The system is imperfect at best (aren’t they all?), but it can at least deliver us a primer or rough outline or jumping-off point. I’m a little behind this year, having yet to see Marty Supreme (no contentious reason for that) or The Secret Agent (access remains an issue), but I was prompted to catch up with Sentimental Value, the 800-pound Nordic gorilla of the nominees.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE. Far Northern European cinema remains something of a straw man in my education, a sphere of influence burdened equally by my own contrarianism and the importance assigned to it by the critical community. Ingmar Bergman’s always been one of the elephants in the screening room, a titan whose influence is indisputable, but for whom I find reverence frequently suspect. Probably unfairly, I’ve lumped in Joachim Trier, the Danish-born Norwegian auteur who, after years of run-up, became something of a nerd-household name with The Worst Person in the World (2021). The cineastes were all-abuzz back then, probably rightfully, but even in the newly widened cinematic landscape of early post-COVID, I passed. We can’t hide from our own preconceptions forever.
There are indeed elements of Sentimental Value that fly in the face of my own, well, sentimental values regarding cinema. It opens with emotionally freighted voiceover, belabors the difficulty of parent-child relationships and, in its portrait of the artist as an old man, revisits some pretty worked-over territory. But, this being the current moment, those elements do more to distance it from the swollen middle of contemporary movies than to align it with something else. Furthermore, Trier and his cast are so committed to the emotional truth of the story (about a famous filmmaker and even more famously absent father trying to reconnect with his adult daughters) that some of the tropes transcend cliché.
Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who hasn’t made a feature film in 15 years, returns to Oslo for the funeral of his ex-wife, the mother of his children. He’s been a long time gone and he’s armed with a new screenplay with a lead role intended for his elder daughter Nora (Renata Reinsve). Caught up in her own turmoil, of which her contempt for her father is certainly part, she wants nothing to do with it. In a happy accident, Gustav crosses paths with an American movie star (Elle Fanning) at a festival, casts her in the part, secures Netflix financing and sets to work preparing to shoot what is now a doomed, deeply personal project.
It’s a testament to Trier’s vision that dozens of production companies are listed in the credits here. This is the sort of movie that doesn’t really get made anymore (especially not in this country), but is an opportunity for the medium to do some of the things that it is uniquely capable of doing. R. 133M. STREAMING.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE. Next leg of the journey for the post-apocalyptic zombie horror. R. 109M. BROADWAY.
AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH. Na’vi-on-Na’vi violence in the latest installment of James Cameron’s sci-fi action franchise. PG13. 195M. BROADWAY (3D).
CLIKA. A viral video takes a Mexican musician (Jay Dee) to the big-time. R. 82M. BROADWAY.
HAMNET. Agnes and William Shakespeare cope with the loss of their son in 16th century England. PG13. 126M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
THE HOUSEMAID. Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney in a thriller about weird dynamics with the help. R. 131M. BROADWAY.
IRON LUNG. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi submarine trip through a sea of blood. Co-written, directed and starring Mark Fischbach. R. 127M. BROADWAY.
LORD OF THE RINGS. Extended versions of the already very long Peter Jackson adaptations on the 25th anniversary. PG13. BROADWAY.
MARTY SUPREME. Timothée Chalamet plays a ping pong champ in the 1950s, when that kind of thing apparently got you laid. R. 150M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
MELANIA. Director Brett Ratner bounces back from rape and sexual misconduct allegations and a cameo in the Epstein files by directing a vanity doc about the first lady, who’s comfortable enough with sexual predators. PG. 104M. BROADWAY.
MERCY. Chris Pratt is on speed-trial for murder before an AI judge and I don’t know who to root against harder. PG13. 100M. BROADWAY.
MOSES THE BLACK. Hagiography meets gangster redemption starring Chukwudi Iwuji and Omar Epps. 110M. BROADWAY.
NO OTHER CHOICE. Park Chan-Wook directs Lee Byung-hun in a satirical psychological thriller about a man out to kill a business rival. R. 139M. MINOR.
PRIMATE. Vacation with friends turns to horror when the family chimp gets rabies and that’s why we don’t have pets with thumbs. R. 89M. BROADWAY.
RETURN TO SILENT HILL. A love letter draws a man to the killer ghost town. R. 106M. BROADWAY.
SEND HELP. Rachel McAdams goes feral as a mistreated employee stranded with her rotten boss (Dylan O’Brien). R. 113M. BROADWAY (3D), MINOR.
SHELTER. Jason Statham may have to keep his shirt in this action movie set in chilly Scotland, where a girl (Harriet Walter) must evade bad guys. R. 107M. BROADWAY.
ZOOTOPIA 2. Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman return to voice the rabbit and fox crimefighting duo in the animated comedy adventure. PG. 108M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in ‘Bigger Than All of Us’.