Reviews: 'Sentimental Value,' 'Is This Thing On?,' and 'Dead Man's Wire,' at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival

Reviewing the three big films from the festival's final day

Image: NEON

The 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival is now in the books, after wrapping up Sunday night with the closing film Sentimental Value.

I’ll have more general thoughts on the festival later this week, as well as several more feature reviews tomorrow and a roundup of documentary reviews, likely on Wednesday. But in the meantime, here are my reviews of three films that showed at the Film Society Center on the festival’s final day:

Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier wowed everyone at PFF and several other festivals in 2021 with The Worst Person in the World, and now he’s reunited with that film’s star, Renate Reinsve, for the story of an aging showbiz legend who realizes, way too late, that he’s blown his relationships with his two adult daughters. This is also the premise of another PFF film, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, but Trier’s film does it way better.

Stellan Skarsgard plays Gustav, a legendary but past-his-prime Norwegian film director, the kind of filmmaker who gets feted at film festivals but can’t get funding to make a new film- and unlike Coppola, he doesn’t seem to have a winery he can sell to finance it.

Gustav has had a complicated family life- his mother, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter, was tortured, and later committed suicide, in the house where Gustav later lived with his wife and two daughters. After Gustav left the family when they were young and gained fame, the daughters were raised by their mother, who had just died as the film’s main events began. Pulling a Royal Tenenbaum after not seeing his children for years, Gustav has written a very personal new script that he hopes will salvage his career, as well as his relationships with his daughters.

The daughters are Nora (a stage actress played by Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), a wife and mother who starred in one of Gustav’s famous films when she was young, but left acting behind.

The phrase “intergenerational trauma” is not spoken aloud in this film, but it’s clear that multiple generations of this family are scarred by the past- no one more so than Nora, whose life, it appears, has been a series of chaotic acting roles and ill-fated affairs, most recently with another actor (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, Trier’s longtime leading man, who bears a striking resemblance to former Eagles quarterback Nick Foles.)

There’s not a performer alive who can play a beguiling, troubled woman who is going through it quite like Renate Reinsve, who has started to pop up in Hollywood roles, such as last year’s A Different Man and the Apple Presumed Innocent show, in addition to her European arthouse stuff, like year’s batshit insane Armand.

The family stuff is poignant, even if it wraps up a bit too neatly. But I also really loved its treatment of showbiz, especially once Elle Fanning shows up as an American movie star who’s set to star in Skarsgard’s film. The film-within-a-film, amusingly, is a Netflix movie, while Sentimental Value itself is not; they are also, for some reason, sitting for press junket interviews before the film starts production.

Sentimental Value, while a tick below Worst Person in the World, is nevertheless one of the best international films of the festival and of the year. It comes out in November.

Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper’s third film as director, Is This Thing On?, is a film about comedians and divorce that’s considerably better than most films about comedians, and also most movies about divorce. On the latter point, it’s the second movie I saw that day that was better than the one Noah Baumbach made about the same thing.

A bit of a downshift from Cooper’s first two efforts, A Star is Born and Maestro, this one doesn’t appear to have made every single decision with the likelihood of Oscars in mind. But it’s still a winning effort that I liked a lot more than I expected to.

Will Arnett, an actor whose movie roles tend to either be tiny or in voice-acting form, gets a rare turn as a leading man and makes the most of it. As the film begins, Alex, Arnett’s character, is getting divorced from Tess (Laura Dern, who played the divorce lawyer in Baumbach’s Marriage Story but has now been promoted to ex-wife).

Lonely in his city apartment and aware that his mother (Christine Ebersole) seems to have taken his ex’s side, Alex decides to try his hand at stand-up comedy at the Comedy Cellar, entirely using material about his ongoing divorce. Meanwhile, Tess, a former Olympic volleyball player, takes steps back into her old career.

Written by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell, the film is loosely based on the life of the British soccer player-turned-comedian John Bishop. We also spend some time with the ex-couple’s group of friends, which includes Cooper himself, in a small role as Alex’s aspiring-actor friend whose name, for some reason, is “Balls.” (Arnett and Cooper, in some scenes, look so much alike that it’s a distraction.)

In telling a story about comedians and divorced guys, Is This Thing On? mostly avoids the toxic associations that each of those things has these days. Both ex-partners also take turns toward dating new people; you would never guess, in a million years, who shows up as Dern’s date, in what’s the best joke in a movie.

Sure, like most movie comedians, Arnett’s character is not that funny and tends to use his time on stage more as an extended therapy session than as an opportunity to tell jokes. But the camaraderie among the group of comics is a joy, and the same is true of the dynamics among the older friends.

Good things happen when one chooses to stop chasing Oscars… Is This Thing On? comes out in December.

(Strange coincidence: In both Is This Thing On? and Sentimental Value, there’s a scene in which a male artist character, in trying in vain to clean up a mess, does so by whetting an entire paper towel roll. This happened in two movies that I saw back-to-back on Sunday, after I had never seen that in a single film that I had seen in my entire life up to that point.)

Dead Man’s Wire

I don’t remember who it was who described Samuel L. Jackson, in his role as DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, as “like God at the microphone.” But that same description could apply to Colman Domingo as Fred Temple, an Indianapolis radio host who played a peripheral role in the drama at the center of Gus Van Sant’s new film Dead Man’s Wire.

The film, steeped in meticulous period detail, tells the story of a few days in the winter of 1977, when Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgard) took a mortgage company manager (Dacre Montgomery) hostage, over a dispute in which Kiritsis believed the mortgage company had screwed him on a land deal.

We get all sides of the hostage situation, including the cops (led by an almost unrecognizable Cary Elwes), an ambitious TV news reporter (Industry star Myha’la), and the kidnapped man’s greedy and uncaring father (Al Pacino, in a bit of Dog Day Afternoon-related stunt casting, in which he plays the part with a luxurious, Foghorn Leghorn-like accent.)

But the coolest guy in the room is Colman Domingo’s Fred Temple, who brings the story into another gear every time he’s on screen. I might have preferred to watch a whole movie about him, in which the hostage situation was but a minor part. The last-minute announcement that West Philly’s own Domingo would appear and collect the Lumiere Award led to a much more packed house than expected.

(I assumed from watching the film that Fred Temple was both a real person and an Indianapolis institution, but he is neither. In real life, Kiritsis’ confidant during the standoff was a newsman named Fred Heckman.)

The story, in which Kiritsis became something of a folk hero, certainly prefigured the Luigi Mangione affair this year, and the film stacks the deck in a way by making the mortgage company look as evil as possible. I’m sure that company did plenty of bad stuff, although they likely had the right idea about not wanting to get into business with Tony Kiritsis.

The film also successfully recreates such a nontraditional location as Indianapolis, although it was shot in Louisville, Kentucky.

Dead Man’s Wire is Gus Van Sant’s first film in seven years, and almost certainly his best since Milk in 2008. Van Sant, somewhat unbelievably, is now 73 years old.

The film also, much like One Battle After Another, includes Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” this time over the closing credits. I can’t be the only one who wanted to shout “Green Acres! Beverly Hillbillies! And Hooterville Junction!”

One more note, also on the closing credits: Like a lot of period films, Dead Man’s Wire shows us the pictures of the real people, and that includes what the real Tony Kiritsis looked like- a short, sort of ruddy-faced guy, who looks nothing like how Bill Skarsgard played him. I realize that type of actor doesn’t really exist anymore, but… if they could have found one somehow, it would have made the film better.

Dead Man’s Wire comes out for a qualifying run in December before opening wider in 2026.