Why Sentimental Value should win the best picture Oscar

This best picture race is 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 a drama about an actor’s daddy issues.

But if Sentimental Value feels the least essential of this year’s nominees, that view misses what Joachim Trier has made from familiar material. The Danish-Norwegian co-writer and director has fashioned a grand, sprawling family saga that spirals across decades and folds in a movie about moviemaking, churning emotionally like Bergman while retaining a springiness and playfulness akin to Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World.

Renate Reinsve plays Nora, a not-unsuccessful Norwegian stage and TV actress who suffers paralysing stage fright, opposite Stellan Skarsgård’s swaggering, faded director and absent, alcoholic father, Gustav.

Norway

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