Sentimental Value

“Sentimental Value” is correctly billed as both a comedy and a drama but it begins in the vein of horror as Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve), a theatre actor, seized by stage fright in the moments just before the first performance of her new play, is wrangled into her place in the nick of time by the cast and crew after multiple attempts to flee. There is a discernible air of theatricality to this freakout, however, underlined in how the crew seems to take it in stone-faced professional stride, as if flipping out is how she finds her nerve, a little like the beginning of “The Insider” where Mike Wallace argues with the Ayatollah’s bodyguard to get his heart started. Indeed, it is telling that we hardly see Nora’s actual performance, just this one before it, an evocative delineation of how Joachim Trier’s Scandinavian drama takes place at the intersection of art and life. Not long after, Nora’s father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed film director, returns home for his ex-wife’s funeral after walking out on her and Nora and Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) many years ago. But instead of making amends as one might expect, he makes a movie pitch to Nora, asking her to star in what he hopes will be his comeback film as none other than his own mother who committed suicide when he was just a boy with plans to shoot it in the very same house where the act took place.

Gustav is seeking a cinematic exorcism by way of a cinematic seance, or something, but Nora turns him down flat, and the way Reinsve has her mouth fall open, just slightly, when he proposes his idea becomes one small gesture that cracks open a whole portal into the emotional damage he inflicted. In lieu of casting her, he casts an American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), seeking a different kind of work and inspired by one of Gustav’s earlier movies that starred Agnes before she chose to eschew acting. The sequences in which Gustav and Rachel prepare and rehearse in his mother’s house become a weird kind of voodoo in which we see not only him trying to resuscitate his mother but cast someone else in the role of his daughter. When Rachel achieves an emotional breakthrough in rehearsal, it is affecting, for her and the others around her, all except for Gustav, who seems to feel nothing at all, for one cruel moment seeming to suggest that an artist cannot manufacture his or her own closure.

Gustav is a real piece of work, as they say, and Skarsgård’s performance lives it. He tells Nora that in first seeing an actor perform, he can judge within a matter of minutes whether they are any good or not, and it is that sort of haughty judgement with which Skarsgård plays the entire part. When Gustav meets with Nora, the scene is no different, really, than how he rehearses later with Rachel, suggesting this is how he views all of life, as a rehearsal, a working through, a movie set where he is assigning his own kin motivation. He even casts Agnes’s son in a small role in his burgeoning film, hearkening back to his relationship with Agnes when she was young, forging connection through work. Yet, if Trier comes across primed to dissect the real-world limits of his character’s approach, he pulls each punch he has so shrewdly set up. The denouement of “Sentimental Value” is altogether just so easy, every piece fitting snugly into place, even the usurping of the home not being where heart is cliche. Art can heal all wounds, it seems to say, with something like the kind of shrugging smile Gustav often employs, and is why I cannot help but feel convinced this movie is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Nouvelle Vague

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” is a movie in which the making of it has become as famous as the movie itself. After all, it not only helped usher in the vital French New Wave filmmaking movement but essentially ushered in modern movies themselves; as no less an authority than Criterion puts it, “there was before ‘Breathless,’ and there was after ‘Breathless.’” But the movie has become so synonymous with its making because more than most, the production and the completed motion picture are wholly intertwined. By utilizing familiar, rulebound Hollywood genres and then reimagining them through rule-breaking techniques, Godard was not only commenting on and critiquing Hollywood but rendering an intrinsic argument that how a director chooses to tell his or her story makes a movie what it is in the first place. If you watch Richard Linklater’s new Netflix movie “Nouvelle Vague” about the making of Breathless having never seen it, you might come away wondering what, exactly, “Breathless” was about as it remains, well, a little vague on that topic. Yet, it still succeeds not because it’s more about the production than the finished product but because in the way that Godard made movies, the finished product was the production, and vice-versa. To see “Breathless” being made is to see “Breathless.” 

If “Breathless” is inseparable from its making, so, too, is it inseparable from its auteur. Famously, Godard infused his movies with quotes and observations reflecting his own attitudes and philosophies and so Linklater has his perpetual sunglasses-wearing Godard (Guillame Marbeck) communicate almost exclusively in quotes and observations, not like one of his characters but to evoke how his characters were him. His filmmaking methods, meanwhile, deploying a moving camera, not even bothering to look through the viewfinder, eschewing continuity, wears his producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) thin while his star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), ponders jumping ship. In traditional terms, that might make “Nouvelle Vague” an underdog story, but, of course, we know how this story ends, and it’s a testament to Linklater’s carefree style that the proceedings never turn sentimental or solemn. He is a modern master of the hangout movie, after all, and that’s what “Nouvelle Vague” often resembles, its cast and crew in repose in cafes as Godard consults his notebook, bringing his belief that the movie before him exists as a kind of blank page to leisurely life.

As the title suggests, however, “Nouvelle Vague” is not just about the making of “Breathless” but the French New Wave itself. That’s why we see Godard consulting and socialize with esteemed fellow members of the movement. The ones that Linklater cannot manage to squeeze into the narrative he still honors by identifying them via title card while having them look straight into the camera. Yet, despite being a concise evocation of how it takes village, these cameos belie “Nouvelle Vague” as requiring some prior knowledge of its eponymous film movement; this is not necessarily a movie for beginners. But that’s also what fascinates me. Godard was suspicious of Netflix, and it’s more than a little odd that a movie about making “Breathless” would be tucked in there with so many deliberately forgettable titles, just one more to scroll past. But there is something tantalizing about it too. “Weekend” and “Vivre sa vie” were not the first Godard movies I saw, but they were also some of the first times I remember really wondering of movies, “Ok, what is this?” I like imagining unsuspecting people having their curiosity sparked by “Nouvelle Vague,” investigating the movement’s back catalogue and even being inspired to gather some friends and go make something of their own. And that is why Linklater might not have intended this as a love letter so much as a message in a bottle. 

Friday's Mulled Wine: A Merry Little Ex-Mas

Let’s be honest: Netflix Christmas movies tend to be the province of one-time stars who have gone MIA, in a manner of speaking, like Lindsay Lohan, like Brooke Shields, or like Alicia Silverstone in this year’s “A Merry Little Ex-Mas,” not to be confused with 2022’s “Merry Ex-Mas,” or 2014’s “Merry Ex Mas,” which can only suggest that next year we will graduate to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Ex-Mas.” Silverstone, however, is in a different tier than your typical Made-for-TV Christmas movie lead. She gave one of the finest romantic comedy performances of the modern era, if not all time, in “Clueless,” and though her career has ebbed and flowed, anytime I would see her in something, like Amy Heckerling’s “Vamps,” or a guest appearance on the TV show “Children’s Hospital,” it was clear she maintained her comic chops. And if the quality of assembly line holiday-themed movies tends to correlate to the quality of the lead performance, Silverstone’s is likely as good as you’re going to get this holiday season. 

Silverstone lamenting, “We were going to do origami,” or snarling, “I go everywhere with a screwdriver,” likely mean nothing out of context, but I’m telling you, the way she says them in “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” is not just literally laugh-out-loud funny, it’s an embodiment of the holidays as a pressure cooker of family stress. It also breathes life into her character, Kate, a handywoman who harbored bigger dreams of life in a bigger city until she put all that on hold to marry Everett (Oliver Hudson) and start a family. As “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” begins, however, the happy couple is seeking a divorce, Kate is plotting a move to Boston, and so they plan to spend one last holiday together as a family. But Everett’s new girlfriend Tess (Jameela Jamil) joining the festivities rekindles resentments and Kate spirals from fear that she might be losing her family to this interloper. 

Silverstone effuses her character’s spiral with a mirthful comic desperation, one that transforms the gingerbread house competition mandatory for all such movies into just that, a competition she becomes convinced can salvage everything if only she can win it. And though the part of Tess is broadly written, Jamil plays it with true panache, and she and Silverstone play off one another well, as do Silverstone and Melissa Joan Hart as the former’s sassy sister. Hart, in fact, deserved more screen time, more than Hudson, certainly, who proves a non-starter. Part of the problem may stem from the script. By making Kate and Everett’s divorce amicable rather than antagonistic, it removes the necessary tension for a central rom com couple to thrive, none of which is helped by Hudson’s easygoing air. When Tess makes a crack about their sex life not being quite all the way there yet, Jamil sells the joke even as it seems to fly right over Hudson’s head.

It goes over the movie’s head too. There might be a few attempts at bawdiness forbidden on the Hallmark and Great American Family Channels, and Kate’s character might be infused with Silverstone’s real-life leftist tendencies, but “A Merry Little Ex-Mas” has a real reactionary streak, nevertheless. It begins with various townsfolk essentially telling Kate and Everett that divorce is a moral abomination. And it’s why even if Kate is eventually allowed to follow her professional dreams, she can only follow them once she as reaffirmed her faith in the traditional family unit, which given Silverstone’s frantic air throughout, feels less like reaffirmation than quiet coercion. And now is a good time to tell you the name of the holiday-themed town where Kate and her family reside is called Winterlight, like the 1963 Ingmar Bergman movie where a priest goes through the motions while doubting the existence of God. I thought less of the priest, though, than his mistress, Marta, counseled to get out of the small town before it crushes her dreams, only to stay behind and stand by her man, praying on his behalf to a Creator she does not even believe in. That might as well be me before every one of these seasonal movies, praying to the movie gods before it starts, hearing only silence in return. 

Bunny

“Bunny” begins with its eponymous hustler and gigolo (Mo Stark), like Richard Gere, he helpfully explains in voiceover, in the back of a cop car due to the dead body that turns up in his East Village tenement building. That sound likes a thriller, but Ben Jacobson’s film is anything but, more like a life-affirming comic potboiler. To get the body outside without drawing the attention of the neighborhood cops asking questions about the deceased’s illegally parked car, Bunny draws on the help of myriad tenants, like his best friend Dino (Jacobson), and even unexpected outsiders, such as the Orthodox Jewish Airbnb tenant (Genevieve Hudson-Price), revealing himself as the gregarious straw that stirs the whole building’s drink. No wonder his wife (Liza Colby) wants to give him a special birthday present (it is his birthday, after all): a threesome. This prospective gift and its sweet intent underlines Bunny’s lack of a proper rating in so much as it improbably blends myriad R-rated elements with a G-rated spirit.

Taking place almost entirely in and around this tenement building, moving up and down floors and from apartment to apartment, sometimes out onto the sidewalk and then back inside, Jacobson conveys “Bunny” through a handheld camera that is not like a fly on the wall but an active participant, right there in the middle of the scrum and putting us in the middle of the scrum too so that we process information at the same time as the characters. This underlines how “Bunny” shows little interest in backstory, preferring to exist in the moment, shaping its characters by how they react to unfolding events. Take Bunny’s father-in-law (Tony Drazan), who shows up to try reconcile with his daughter but then gets a little stoned and winds up coolly riding the proverbial wave, or the cop on the sidewalk (Liz Caribel Sierra), who starts off suspicious of Bunny but comes to see who he really is and what he stands for, embodying an unlikely sense of community policing.

That notion of community policing might be a fantasy gone too far for some viewers. And the truth is, even if “Bunny” does a credible job making you believe the tenants might be willing to hold their noses at a bad smell, or look the other way at some moral infraction, the dead body driving the plot forward cannot help but start to feel sort of figuratively weightless. It’s an entertaining ride throughout, don’t get me wrong, but that lack of tension prevents a true culmination, almost as if its kind heart was not quite willing to take the dark-hearted premise as far as it might go. 

Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Cinema Romantico retired its longstanding Who is the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes nominee bit last year because, honestly, we thought this whole oft-enjoyable but unquestionably farcical annual excuse for Hollywood to throw its holiday office party by honoring excellence in film and television was dead. I would have sworn I saw Taylor Swift kill it with my own eyes. But no, the Globes, it turns out, are a little like college football’s Bahamas Bowl, nominally international, perpetually on shaky ground, seemingly dead and buried but then resurrected as something called the Xbox Bowl. So, welcome to the 2026 Xbox Golden Globes. And boy, did I find their nominations this year fascinating. Not from a What This Means for Award Season perspective, mind you, but from their own This is a Soiree of Celebrity perspective.

It might seem surprising that “Wicked: For More Money” was not nominated in the Best Picture Comedy or Musical category, but they did nominate its two stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in the acting categories and so the producers can cut to them throughout the broadcast and still maintain the movie’s never-ending marketing campaign which is what really matters. Glen Powell did not make the cut in one of the two Best Actor movie categories for “The Running Man,” but that’s because the Globes voters knew they could slot him in for “Chad Powers” in the TV actor category, and then that movie acting slot could be set aside for “The Smashing Machine’s” Dwayne Johnson in order to put him at a prominent table so he can laugh too hard at all the bad jokes to convey he is willing to play the game and would really, really, really like to be nominated for one of the real awards. If there is any genuine shock, it’s that Sydney Sweeney did not earn a nomination for “Christy.” But then, look who got that nomination instead: Julia Roberts for “After the Hunt.” And you’re damn right, she did. 

Was she good in “After the Hunt?” I have no idea; I haven’t seen it yet; that’s not the point. The point is, the buzz on it has been bad, the reviews have been worse, no one has been discussing her as an awards contender, and yet, she finds herself with a nomination, nevertheless. Sydney Sweeney might be The Discourse Machine, but Julia Roberts is American royalty, our Princess of Wales, who is always invited to the party, irrefutably this year’s Golden Globes-iest. I’ll be happy to see her, whenever this thing airs, you can look up the date and time for the Xbox Golden Globes yourself. 

The Baltimorons

The Christmas season is defined by the contrast between light and dark and so, too, is “The Baltimorons,” the exceptional new indie comedy directed and co-written by Jay Duplass. It begins with Cliff (Michael Strassner) attempting to hang himself. Duplass, though, recounts this in long shot, an angle typically denoting comedy, and sure enough, Cliff winds up sprawled on the floor when the rope breaks, as startling as it is side-splitting, light and dark in equal measure. Indeed, later Cliff will explain the rope snapping was on account of his “holiday weight.” Flash ahead six months and Cliff is sober, engaged to Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), and has quit the improv comedy scene that exacerbated his tendency toward depression. He’s studying to be a mortgage broker, he says, always adding that he’s not joking, which can’t help but make you wonder if he is joking, hinting at dissatisfaction with his new life. As if manifesting that dissatisfaction, he bumps his face against the door of Brittany’s family house on his way in for Christmas Eve festivities, necessitating emergency dental surgery, performed by the only dentist available, workaholic Didi (Liz Larsen) who has been abandoned by her family for Christmas Eve festivities of her own, and triggering an unexpected comic adventure between the unlikely duo traversing Charm City on the holiest of nights.

“The Baltimorons” takes its title from the name of Cliff’s improv troupe before it went haywire, and rather than merely functioning as a character detail, Duplass’s entire movie is sculpted in the spirit of improvisational comedy. Cliff’s sudden tooth problem might as well be the audience shouting, “Dentist office!” when asked to provide a location. And though all the complications and incidents that follow, from Cliff’s car being towed, to the duo crashing Didi’s ex-husband’s wedding reception, to them going crabbing in the middle of night, might sound as if they strain credulity, “The Baltimorons” is not operating on traditional screenwriting terms. Even before Cliff and Didi wind up at an unlikely Christmas Eve improv pop-up and wind up onstage together, they are already caught up in the moment, egging one another on, spiritually saying, “Yes, and” to whatever this is. And whatever it is, thankfully, is not something that is ever truly decided or summarized, ultimately left up in the air, refusing to provide one big pat answer just as it refuses to minimize Cliff’s very real problems or reduce Brittany to a mere complication or impediment; she cares about him. 

Strassner also holds the light and dark in equal measure in his performance, as hilarious to watch as it is hard, suggesting something like a modern John Candy had he received the kind of roles he deserved. At an AA meeting near the end, when Cliff says the standard opening line about being an alcoholic, it resonates with fullness hard to believe until you hear it. As good as Strassner is, though, it’s Larsen who truly shines in bringing “The Baltimorons” home. There’s more than a little of “Harold and Maude” here and the way she calls him “kid” continually keeps cutting the whole relationship down to size. Her big husky laugh at the absurd things he tends to say and do conveys both disbelief at herself going along at this situation and implicit understanding of why she would. She evokes no sense of narrative programming, just someone stepping on the stage of alive and letting herself be carried along. “Where are we going with this, kid?” she asks as the movie ends, unsure but curious, utterly alive to the possibility.

Nearing the Bottom of the Sports Documentary Barrel

There are few movie genres at present more enervating and ubiquitous than sports documentaries. It is not just that they tend to be unenlightening Wikipedia-style histories and aesthetically uninteresting but that they are often made with the blessing if not involvement of their subjects to ensure maximum humdrum hagiography. When the six-part documentary chronicling one of the most unexciting big-name athletes of our age, Derek Jeter, was announced, I pitched some potential projects to spur us to the conclusion of the boring sports documentary boom sooner rather than later. Among my ho-hum ideas was a six-part documentary about NFL journeyman quarterback Dave Krieg. I proposed six parts because Krieg played for six teams during his career, none of which were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And the only thing that might be more dull than a six-part Dave Krieg documentary would be a 10-part documentary on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise that feels closer in a historical professional gridiron sense to the USFL’s Tampa Bay Bandits (whose former players the Buccaneers briefly employed during the strike season of 1987) than the NFL’s Cowboys, Packers, or Steelers. And yet, a 10-part documentary on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, “Raise the Flags,” presented by Skydance Sports and Prime Video Sports will begin streaming next Thursday, December 11th, on Amazon Prime.

A documentary about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers sounds like a documentary about the Minnesota Timberwolves, frankly, a pitch I have also made, and a franchise that much like the Bucs feels less known for anything of consequence than known for an all-around haplessness. True, Tampa Bay has won a pair of Super Bowls, but their first was a game the veteran NFL scribe Paul Zimmerman used one word - “Bleeaugh!” - to summarize and the Pandemic Super Bowl. No, if Tampa Bay has a claim to fame, it is losing the first 26 games they played as an expansion franchise christened in 1976, or maybe it is their old creamsicle jerseys, which deserve one whole episode in this thing, at least. “The rest of it,” Ray Ratto wrote of Buccaneer history at Defector, “is just a collection of 7-9 seasons with a playoff loss every three years or so on average. Decades of that.” I mean, that is essentially a sports documentary pitch that I would make!

Studio Head: “So, how exactly do you see this movie?”

Me: “As a collection of 7-9 seasons with a playoff loss every three years or so on average. Decades of that.”

Studio Head: “That doesn’t sound so exciting.”

Me: “Oh, God, no. But excitement isn’t what we’re looking for here.” 

Studio Head: “Well, will Tom Brady be involved?”

Me: “I don’t really see him as the archetypal Bucs quarterback.” 

Studio Head: “Who’s the archetypal Bucs quarterback?”

Me: “Steve DeBerg.”

Studio Head: “Steve DeBerg???”

Me: “Do you think we can get him to sit for an interview?”

Will “Raise the Flags” finally end the sports documentary as we know it? If I had one Christmas wish...