December 5-11, 2025

Hello, friends!  

The holiday season has officially begun this week at the Pickford, and we have some newly beloved hit films continuing -- Wicked: For Good (Bay St.), Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Grand Ave), and Zootopia 2 (Grand Ave.) -- and a couple of new films that are among the best of the year and will almost certainly be scooping up some Oscar nominations: Hamnet  (Bay St.) and Sentimental Value (Grand Ave.). 

Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, was one of my favorite films out of the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, and it was also one of the most moving, a tears-down-my-face, "3-tissue movie." (I was actually afraid at a couple of points I would embarrass myself with an audible sob or two. Thankfully, the tears just rolled on, silently.)  And it seems Toronto audiences felt the same as I: Hamnet won the People’s Choice award at TIFF, an award that is often a predictor of Oscar love. Many TIFF People’s Choice winners have gone on to be Best Picture nominees or winners, including recent films like JoJo Rabbit, Marriage Story, Parasite, Belfast, The Power of the Dog, The Fabelmans, Women Talking, American Fiction, The Holdovers, Anora, and also Zhao’s own Nomadland, which won Best Picture in 2020.

Hamnet--based on a well-regarded novel of the same name and which, I bet, many of you have read--imagines the tragic backstory that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. It beautifully and lushly depicts the passionate romance between Will Shakespeare (Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Buckley), and their subsequent warm and playful life together with their children.  (Note for anyone wondering: The opening title card of the film explains the why of "HamNet" vs. "HamLet.") 

One of the things I deeply loved about the film is its focus on Agnes: it is as much her story as it is Shakespeare's, perhaps moreso, depicting her as a woman of nature and herblore, more comfortable outside than she is in, and the film is almost entirely set in the wild countryside and forests, rather than in London with Shakespeare and his players. In fact, if you did not know going in, that it was a film “about Shakespeare,” you may not guess until well into the film that “Will” is, in fact, William Shakespeare. The story offers us something of an opposites-attract tale, for Agnes cares and knows little about Will’s writing and his plays--her natural loves and her deep knowledge are embedded instead in the earth, water, animals, and green things of the world--and when tragedy befalls the couple, it is a crucible that tests their ability to continue to love and understand one another in the midst of their naturally differing expressions of grief. 

As such, the film is very much dependent upon the performances of Mescal and Buckley, actors who must enact the highest of highs and lowest of lows--and they do. They are pure joy to watch. Buckely, in particular, is simply transcendent. I have to shout out the children here, too; the film requires a depth in their performances that is rare in young actors, and Jacobi Jupe is superb, reminding me a bit of a young Anna Paquin in The Piano.  

Hamnet, above all, is a film to see in theaters. Big performances, big emotions, stunning cinematography from Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest), and an immersive score from Max Richter (Arrival). But don’t forget to bring a tissue--or three. 

Difficult as it is to find a film this year I love more than Hamnet, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value just might be it. And it makes an interesting parallel to Hamnet: both are films about families and about artistic expression and about the ways those families try to connect with one another through those expressions. But if Hamnet leans towards melodrama, Sentimental Value does the opposite, plumbing the same depth of emotion but doing so through dry (often laugh out loud) humor and restrained performances, where characters express themselves by what they do not say as much as what they do.

The story follows sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) whose mother dies, and they return to their childhood home for the funeral--a house full of the echoes of their family’s difficult past--and their long estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), reenters their lives. Gustav, a renowned film director who chose his work over his family, literally abandoning them for it and developing closer relationships with actors in his films than his daughters, now wants Nora, a highly regarded stage actress, to star in his new film in a role he wrote specifically for her. It’s a request the incredulous Nora finds fraught, to say the least, given that her father has shown no apparent interest in her or her stage career up to that point. When she rejects him, he pivots to casting an American actress (Elle Fanning) in the role and uses the family home to rehearse, and his presence and his work become impossible to ignore. 

Like Trier’s other films, including The Worst Person in the World (also starring Reinsve), Sentimental Value offers a beautiful, complex look at human relationships but with such an effortlessness and lightness of touch that the seriousness of the themes and the depth of the emotions can sneak up on you. 

Take the opening scene, for example: in it, Nora is backstage for the premiere of a play at a packed house at the National Theatre in Oslo, and she is consumed with a frantic and overwhelming stage fright, consummate and experienced actress though she is. It’s a scene that is simultaneously so intense and so darkly funny that you’re immediately immersed in the film’s world and its characters, and it is not until later reflection that it’s clear that the scene sets up what we need to know about Nora’s character and her relationship to art. It also, perhaps more significantly, points us to a kinship with her father, a kinship she herself does not realize, but that the film eventually, beautifully reveals, ultimately offering a profound reflection on art and artists and the ways in which art can provide a vehicle for emotions we might not otherwise be able to express. 

That opening scene is also a one that sets us up for the exquisitely realized relationship between the two very different sisters--one whose quiet groundedness offsets the other’s often feverish intensity-- and whose closeness, in spite of their differences, is the beating heart of the film. 

I would also be remiss not to mention the gloriousness of the craft of acting on display here: Reinsve, Skarsgard, and Fanning are all phenomenal, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as the quiet and gentle Agnes, is a revelation.

Don’t miss this one. It’s simply marvelous.

In addition to those two powerhouse movies, we’ve also got two very special events this week: Playing on Grand Ave. for a Sneak Preview Early Access screening ahead of its theatrical release in 2026, we’ve got Palestine 36, Palestine’s entry into this year’s Oscars. 

Directed by Annemarie Jacir and sweeping and epic in style, Palestine 36 is a film Jacir has been working on since 2019. It tells the history of what happened in Palestine from a perspective we rarely see on film, that is, from multiple Palestinian characters’ perspectives, as they experienced or participated in The Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39, a revolt against violent British rule and against British support of Zionism in the midst of an influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing from Europe.  

Jacir judiciously chooses to focus primarily on the conflict between the British and the Palestinians--the only glimpses we get of the Jewish settlers are from a distance, images of innocent children and families, refugees in the midst of political chaos--and it's a film, as Peter Bradshaw notes in his review in The Guardian that is a "vehement reminder of what doesn't get taught in British schools."  And it's no wonder since the Brits do not come off well in this history, making imperialistic decisions about a land and about peoples that are not their own. Of course, as Hilary White also notes in her review in the Irish Independent, "No film could ever fully entangle this tragic geopolitical mess, but,” she goes on to say, “this is still a compelling snapshot of a chapter that nods towards the now." 

Tickets for this special screening on Saturday, Dec. 6 at 1:30 are already sold out, but if you’d like to stop by our Grand Ave. lobby and put your name on a waiting list, we will certainly try to fit in as many people as we have seats for at the showtime!

Last, our long-toothed friends and the hapless novice of a fur-trapper are back for the holidays! If you’ve not yet experienced the Looney Tunes-inspired, ingeniously slapstick ode to the silent film era that is Hundreds of Beavers, you’re in for a treat. The gags and the laughs are a mile a minute, specially designed for anyone who loves the cleverest and the silliest cinematic jokes, from kids to adults. We’ve got two screenings of the film on Bay St.: a 10 pm Third Eye screening on Saturday, Dec. 6 for our night owls, and a 5:20 pm early evening screening on Thursday, December 11 for those with an earlier bedtime. Prime your funny bone and join us for a rollicking good time! 

See you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa