Sentimental Value

Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve lead an incomparable cast in Joachim Trier’s moving drama about a director’s bid to revive his career and repair his family’s broken bonds.

With its extraordinary performances and wealth of insight as the story of a family struggling to face its rocky history and confronting the price of living for one’s art, Joachim Trier’s new feature represents another high watermark for the Norwegian director.

The winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes festival, Sentimental Value portrays the myriad repercussions of a once-great filmmaker’s effort to recapture his past glory. A man who’s always prioritized his work, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is long estranged from his daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve), a gifted stage actress, and the more grounded Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), now immersed in family life years after performing in one of her father’s most revered movies. He finds a surprising source of support after a Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), discovers his films at a festival retrospective. As preparation for Gustav’s new movie begins with Rachel in the role that Nora had rejected, the uniquely personal nature of his script — based on a tragedy that took place in the house that remains central to the Borgs’ lives — draws the family members together again in ways they could not predict.

As nuanced as it is empathetic, Trier’s screenplay with long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt brings the best out of the formidable duo of Skarsgård and Reinsve. It also elicits comparably exquisite turns by Fanning and from Lilleaas, who deserves the same kind of attention that Reinsve earned for Trier’s 2021 hit The Worst Person In The World.

Jason Anderson, TIFF

Eleanor The Great

Oscar nominee June Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s thoughtful, provocative, and very funny feature directorial debut, about a nonagenarian who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor.

Thoughtful, provocative, and funny, Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut is an affecting character study about storytelling as a means of understanding who we are and the perils of appropriation. Showcasing the singular charisma of 95-year-old Oscar nominee June Squibb, Eleanor the Great reminds us that it’s never too late to get yourself into a whole lot of trouble.

After the death of her best friend and long-time roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar), Eleanor (Squibb) leaves her Florida home for New York City, where she moves in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price). During a visit to the Manhattan Jewish Community Center, Eleanor stumbles her way into a support group for Holocaust survivors and, joining their circle, begins to tell her own story. Except, unbeknownst to everyone listening, it isn’t Eleanor’s story — it’s Bessie’s.

The story snares the attention of journalism student Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to feature Eleanor in an article. Never one to turn away attention, Eleanor begins to forge a close bond with Nina. But how long will it take before that bond is shattered by the truth?

Written by Tory Kamen, Eleanor the Great takes on the weightiest of subjects with the lightest of touches. Compulsively chatty, ultra-opinionated, and lacking in boundaries, Eleanor is a fascinating heroine and an absolute hoot. Drawing upon her wide-ranging experience as an actor, Johansson focuses her gaze on the intricacies of Squibb’s performance, which exudes a complexity rarely afforded to elderly characters, and keeps us laughing, even through the most uncomfortable of confrontations.

The Secret Agent

Winner of multiple prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sly, genre-bending political thriller stars Wagner Moura as Marcelo, a technology expert on the lam and seeking refuge in the Brazilian city of Recife in 1977.

Brazilian filmmaker and TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the year’s greatest films with The Secret Agent, a sly, genre-bending political thriller starring Wagner Moura in a brilliant performance as Marcelo, a technology researcher on the lam in 1977 during Brazil’s notorious military dictatorship.

The film begins with Marcelo headed to the northern city of Recife — the filmmaker’s oft-portrayed hometown — seeking asylum and to be closer to his young son. Arriving during the raucous celebrations of Carnival, Marcelo is welcomed by a colourful community of political refugees, yet an insidious atmosphere of surveillance, paranoia, and danger encircles him. Mendonça Filho spotlights corruption everywhere, from the sleazy local police chief and his ruthless deputies to the director of the state identification archives where Marcelo is simultaneously working, hiding, and searching for his mother’s official ID card.

Told in three parts and toggling between multiple timelines, The Secret Agent reveals its plot in a puzzle-play of intrigue and information that reflects the ways in which truth is often concealed and memory contradicted under oppressive regimes.

The film functions as a précis for the authoritarian playbook. Yet, it is also a thrilling and pleasurable neo-noir steeped in Mendonça Filho’s love for and knowledge of cinema, with film references including Jaws. The film was shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses and vintage camera equipment, replicating the visual style of the 1970s.

Winner of multiple awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and driven by a grim, hypnotic tension, The Secret Agent is essential viewing.

Andréa Picard, TIFF

UIKSARINGITARA (WRONG HUSBAND)

A strange death, village upheavals, and swarming suitors lead to a love story gone awry in acclaimed Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s latest enthralling imagining of ancient Inuit stories.

Celebrated Inuk director Zacharias Kunuk returns to the Festival with his latest offering, a captivating, epic, historical drama about an arranged marriage, set 4,000 years ago. Seamlessly blending the supernatural with verité realism, Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) follows a boy, Sapa (Haiden Angutimarik), and a girl, Kaujak (Theresia Kappianaq), whose union in marriage is promised by their families from birth.

In their village, time passes as they hunt and prepare food, eventually becoming known as “future husband” and “future wife.” Their peaceful existence, however, is soon to be disrupted. Vivid dreams foretell a battle, and an ominous troll-like creature lurks by the waterfront, attempting to pull someone from the village away.

Long-gone elements of Inuit culture, like arranged marriages, sit alongside enduring components like shamanism and drum dancing. Nicknames and namesakes are a large part of Uiksaringitara — there’s a “Wifeless Buddy” in the film, and Kaujuk calls her mother “Younger Sister” because it’s an inherited name — and the importance of naming continues in Inuit culture today.

With arresting imagery, his trademark humour, and a cast of mostly non-professional actors, Kunuk has again created a world that not only builds upon Inuit stories and legends to enthrall audiences but works to preserve these reimagined stories for generations to come. Born from oral traditions, and committed to authenticity, Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) is a unique feat of both cultural conservation and engrossing cinema.

Kelly Boutsalis, TIFF

The President’s Cake

Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake follows young Lamia, who’s selected to provide the cake for her class’s mandated celebration of tyrant Saddam Hussein’s birthday, something she and her ailing grandmother can ill afford. The film details the cruelty brought by extreme scarcity and a lawless leader.

Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake, a multiple award winner at Cannes, is an unforgettable look at a country crushed by poverty and international sanctions — and ruled by a sadistic, greedy, and vain tyrant.

In 1990s Iraq, young Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives with her ailing grandmother, Bibi (Waheeda Thabet Khreiba), eking out an existence in a remote village where the best means of travel is by meshouf, a kind of canoe. Disaster strikes when Lamia is “honoured” with bringing the cake for her school class’s mandatory celebration of Saddam Hussein’s birthday. In other circumstances, this might be an innocuous responsibility, but Bibi and Lamia can’t afford the ingredients — and the last family that didn’t comply was dragged through the streets.

Bibi and Lamia (plus Hindi, her pet rooster) head to the city to purchase the ingredients for the cake, or so Lamia thinks. But when Bibi surprises her with a life-changing plan, Lamia flees, determined to continue her quest, and enlisting Saaed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) to help. The pair’s wide-eyed determination and inventiveness is met only with disdain and contempt, and they are cheated or robbed by almost every adult. It’s the horrifying cost of scarcity and authoritarianism: complete moral collapse. The few who are ostensibly kind may be the worst of all. Lamia and Saaed are invariably confronted with pictures of a wealthy Hussein beaming cruelly at them, even on the back of a truck the kids jump on.

Shot in a neorealist vein, reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica or the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, The President’s Cake offers devastating cinematic proof of Bertolt Brecht’s famous dictum: “Grub first, then ethics.”