🍿 Sentimental Value offers a portrait of a seemingly simple family struggling with fractures carried down from generations. Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are sisters reunited with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), a prominent film director plotting a comeback after a long hiatus. When Nora flatly rejects a role in Gustav’s upcoming film about their family, he sows discord by casting a Hollywood star (played by Elle Fanning) to star in the film instead.

What we liked: The film is grounded and honest — its greatest strength. Director Joachim Trier and his longtime writing partner Eskil Vogt avoid the trap of over-the-top family melodrama, relying instead on a precise, quiet narrative with a patient lens to highlight the stark contrasts between the lead characters. This friction, particularly between the two sisters, serves as the primary engine for the plot with poignant sequences.

Sentimental value raises a critical question about the ethics of turning private family pain into public art. When Gustav replaces his actual daughter with an actress to tell her story, his selfishness — born from his own internal struggles — is laid bare. Trier captures this masterfully without passing moral judgment, instead presenting it as a meditation on the commodification of memory in the pursuit of reclaiming lost professional glory.

Our final verdict? It’s an emotional powerhouse of a film that hits home. The film — well-deserving of its Best International Feature W at the last Academy Awards — is well-worth a watch if you are looking for a pure, deeply human cinematic experience.

WHERE TO WATCH- Catch the film at Downtown Cairo’s Zawya. Watch the trailer on YouTube (watch, runtime: 2:07).

Life After Siham is an intimate exploration of grief

🎞️ Life After Siham is a documentary that explores death, grief, reconciliation, and hope through years of personal archives. French-Egyptian director Namir Abdel Messeeh uses his lens to unpack deep-seated family traumas following the death of his mother in the final installment of this trilogy — following You, Wagih (2005) and The Virgin, the Copts and Me (2012).

The plot: The film's emotional anchor is the 2015 passing of Abdel Messeeh’s mother Siham, who played a central figure in his previous work. Faced with paralyzing shock, he began filming the funeral and the mundane days that followed. The narrative cleverly weaves in archival footage from Egyptian cinema classics — most notably Youssef Chahine’s Return of the Prodigal Son.

What we liked:The film is a masterclass in navigating death and grief, including candid conversations with his father and children and snippets of Egypt’s golden-age cinema. Abdel Messeeh uses the camera as both a shield and a weapon — confronting uncomfortable truths and exploring his own fears of being forgotten. The execution is sharp, with the director starting the film seemingly lost among fragments of the past and ending it with a sense of uncertainty that lends humanity to the narrative.

Our verdict: We loved it, finding the watch an immersive human experience that invites viewers to face their own features and reckon with their own emotions.

WHERE TO WATCH IT- You can catch the film at Zawya and Renaissance Cinema theatres across Egypt. Watch the trailer on YouTube (watch, runtime: 1:33).

Tags: