Tom Salinsky

On its surface, Sentimental Value is just more Scandewegian misery-porn but there’s sly humour and endless layers to this, yes miserable but also often very funny, story of a gloomy patriarch and his two daughters. Bookended by two scenes of actor-daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) at work – one hilarious, one devasting – the structure is curiously unmoored. Stellan Skarsgård enters late, but then the story shifts to centre him, when it isn’t centring the other sister played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaa, or briefly Elle Fanning as the miscast American star.

While this doesn’t quite have the cathartic shocks of The Worst Person in the World, the three leads all deliver heartfelt, nuanced performances and of course this is a movie about making movies, which the Academy loves. But it’s really a movie about home, which isn’t hard to puzzle out given the opening narration, but Trier contrives to make us forget that until it suddenly becomes clear what sacrifice the patriarch has made to fulfil his final vision.

It won’t win Best Picture though and neither will Hamnet, if the bookmakers are to be believed, but it’s currently sitting neck-and-neck with Sinners as my film of the year. Chloé Zhao presents the greatest English language poet simply and humanely, as a man who seeks and questions and plays with his kids and can’t talk to his wife. The script is reluctant to have anyone speak his name out loud, which helps avoid the awful historical namedropping which can quickly plunge a serious drama into giggle-inducing parody, but which also sometimes seems oddly coy.

It’s not an especially long film, at just over two hours, but at first it seems to gently roll along rather than to be pushed propulsively. Will and Agnes meet, marry, have kids, he starts to write, moves to London. Sure, the birth scenes are shockingly traumatic, but these are spikes of adrenaline, not kinetic directions of travel. Gradually, the kids gain a little agency over the story, which is when things start to pick up and, oh my word, little Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe do beautiful work here.

Sensibly avoiding trying to understand what it might be like to be Shakespeare, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and Chloé Zhao’s film instead present what it might be like to married to him, but shot through with the agony of loss. Even so, I was ready to file this one away as a nicely-acted, sensibly constructed, slice-of-Elizabethan-life story, but the climactic scenes utterly broke me. The combination of the two stories reflecting off each other, sensational performances from the leads and Noah Jupe, and some heartstopping moments of non-literalism, left me in bits. It’s really quite something.

Not quite so much to my taste was Train Dreams which felt to me rather like a drastically expurgated version of The Brutalist, since both concern men who helped build America meeting Felicity Jones while she and he are doing an accent, and then suffer loss before a big time jump gives us our coda. But director Clint Bentley is a big fan of Terrance Malik, which I am not, and so while there are a number of striking moments (notably an extended cameo from William H Macy), it’s hard for me to parse out what it’s all supposed to be about, even given that there’s an omniscient voiceover trying to tell me. To be clear, with this kind of generation-spanning story, an omniscient voiceover is probably a better bet than endless “As you know, Bob,” exchanges, and I have seen this kind of thing deployed brilliantly well. But here it just left me feeling that instead of taking the novella as a springboard, and leaping off from it, this film still had one foot in the world of literature and couldn’t break free of it.

That just leaves The Secret Agent, but I’m also keen to see Novelle Vague and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Arriving festooned with nominations – and even some awards – making many critics’ top ten lists and practically screaming Oscar buzz, comes Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, loosely based on the real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman, and featuring a typically intense and brilliant performance from Timothée Chalamet in the lead. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, who excels at table tennis (and is a decent shoe salesman) but whose personal and financial life is a disaster.

The film falls somewhat awkwardly into three segments, the first in which Marty competes at the British Open and loses in the final, the second in which he scrambles to raise the money he needs to get to Japan for the World Championships and the third in which he faces his nemesis again in Tokyo. It’s rather as if someone has remade The Hustler or The Color of Money with table tennis instead of pool, but then someone else has spliced a remake of Uncut Gems into the middle.

As a portrait of a manic, entitled, impulsive, selfish sporting genius it’s rather bracing, sometimes thrilling. But structurally it’s awkward and the middle section not only feels disconnected from the sports movie opening and closing, but it’s far too long and risks becoming repetitive. After the third or fourth time Marty lets perfectly good opportunities slip through his fingers, I was beginning to wonder why I was supposed to root for this guy at all, which meant I was far less invested in whether the idiot won his final match or not.

The baggy middle and excessive running time wouldn’t be so bad if Safdie used the extra time to meticulously tie up every loose end, but this is a film which frays as it extends, with the result that numerous seemingly-important plot lines end up going nowhere (the orange ping pong balls, the mystery of Endo’s racket, Marty’s relationship with Wally, the fact that Marty is supported by Rockwell and banging his wife).

Set against this however, is Safdie’s fluid and muscular camerawork, some brilliantly-staged table tennis action and a great many entertaining set pieces with Chalamet lighting up the screen at every turn. There’s also a lovely feeling of time and place, and Safdie’s typically eccentric casting adds to the enjoyment (entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary as entrepreneur Milton Rockwell, director David Mamet as a theatre director, Penn Jillette as a gun-toting farmer, Sandra Bernhard and Fran Drescher as Marty’s neighbour and mother).

Not my film of the year, but I’m very pleased to have seen it and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Chalamet accepting the Best Actor Oscar and stunned if he wasn’t at least nominated.