Written and Directed by Aaron Schimberg. Starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, Miles G. Jackson, Neal Davidson, Billy Griffith, John Klacsmann, John Keating, C. Mason Wells, Corey Taylor, Danielle Burgos, Sammy Mena, Jon Dieringer, Malachi Weir, David Joseph Regelmann, Nina Marie White, Doug Barron, Stephee Bonifacio, Juney Smith, Lucy Kaminsky, Owen Kline, Jarvis Tomdio, Liana Runcie, Bruce Kitzmeyer, Eleanore Pienta, Charlie Korsmo, and Michael Shannon.
SYNOPSIS:
After undergoing a facial reconstructive surgery, Edward becomes fixated on an actor in a stage production based on his former life.
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Life is what you make of it. In writer/director Aaron Schimberg’s heady and darkly amusing A Different Man, Edward (Sebastian Stan under prosthetic makeup until he isn’t) has a facially different condition that has, understandably, made him a nervous and negative individual to be around. Even when acting in an infomercial demonstrating how able-bodied individuals should behave and what kind of language they should use across all kinds of situations of day-to-day life working with facially different coworkers, Edward overacts his part, playing into the part he has projected onto society of wanting him to play, which is something more along the lines of a Frankenstein creature.
Oswald (Adam Pearson) lives with a similar condition (he has neurofibromatosis in real life, a condition that doesn’t always manifest externally, but in this particular case, means the tumors grow on the outside of the face) yet is far more extroverted and upbeat, quick to cheerfully join into a conversation without so much as a second thought of it people will accept him or react with disgust. At one point, he even performs some karaoke. He walks into a room, and it instantly perks up, with more slowly being revealed about him speaking to a greater life lived so far than some able-bodied people out there.
There is also a woman named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) who has ambitions of directing stage plays, naturally coming to use apartment neighbor Edward as inspiration. She also promises him a role. Questionably (or perhaps fittingly since her writing is based only on what she knows and sees), this play is constructed as the typical disability tragedy story: a man who loved a woman but was so far stuck inside a body (specifically, a face here) he couldn’t appreciate himself, that it’s not necessarily a surprise that there is often a barrier between them connecting on a deeper emotional level.
That’s also not to ignore a reasonably agreeable truth that existing with conventional good looks is essentially a life cheat code, making the act of instigating flirtation and romance easier and without fear of rejection. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean someone is changing the core of their personality. The play seems destined to be as bleak as some of the usual offerings centered on disabled individuals until Oswald emerges.
To say how these two cross paths and what ensues would be a disservice to the viewer and also unnecessary since A Different Man is in a constant state of measurably expanding and raising more questions somehow without collapsing underneath itself. Knowing that Aaron Schimberg also has a disability (a bilateral cleft lip and palate) and that he and Adam Pearson have previously collaborated on the brilliant Chained for Life (which similarly explores romantic friction between the able-bodied and facially different), it’s a given that A Different Man isn’t going to function solely as misery material.
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It’s also almost impossible to completely wrap one’s mind around everything the film is getting at surrounding identity, disability, romance, and how to take ownership of one’s happiness and life. Filled with so many ideas, A Different Man somewhat goes off the rails in its final 20 minutes trying to drive home one of its points. There are occasional aspects of A Different Man that are a bit too on the nose (such as Edward becoming a model following his transformation into Guy), and the third act loses its way. Nevertheless, it recovers with a haunting final line.
Intriguingly, Aaron Schimberg (and Adam Pearson, who almost certainly had some creative input despite not being officially credited writer) also doesn’t take what could be considered the expected route of using a facially different stand-in for the scenes where Sebastian Stan’s Edward has yet to take a chance on groundbreaking facial reconstruction techniques and medicine. As for the prosthetic makeup, it is so damn convincing that even though the film states upfront Adam Pearson only plays Oswald (and my knowledge of what he looks like), it still required a quick bit of research to confirm who was playing who in the first act.
Yes, this is a film where a man becomes so consumed by his disability and the way certain jerks of the world treat him (something he doesn’t necessarily have the confidence or spark to speak up and put a stop to) that he chooses such a revolutionary process to feel more comfortable going after what he wants. Yet it would also be far too simple to summarize the narrative that way, as the film keeps re-tinking its characters’ roles and thoughts, gradually building up steam as one prolonged punchline. A Different Man is a psychological brain-freeze exploring its themes from multiple angles.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
Full of clear northern light and personal crisis, Sentimental Value felt almost like a throwback film for me. It explores emotions not as an adjunct to the main, action-driven plot but as the very subject of the movie itself.
Sentimental Value Directed by Joachim Trier – 2025 Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
The film stars Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav Borg, a 70-year-old director who returns to Oslo to stir up interest in a film he wants to make, while health and financing in an era dominated by bean counters still allow it. He hopes to film at the family house and cast his daughter Nora, a renowned stage actress in her own right, as the lead. However, Nora struggles with intense stage fright and other personal issues. She rejects the role, disdaining the father who abandoned the family when he left her and her sister Agnes as children. In response, Gustav lures a “name” American actress, Rachel Keys (Elle Fanning), to play the part.
Sentimental Value, written by director Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, delves into sibling dynamics, the healing power of art, and how family trauma can be passed down through generations. Yet the film also has moments of sly humor, such as when the often oblivious Gustav gives his nine-year-old grandson a birthday DVD copy of Gaspar Noé’s dreaded Irreversible, something intense and highly inappropriate.
For me, the film harkens back to the works of Ingmar Bergman. The three sisters (with Elle Fanning playing a kind of surrogate sister) reminded me of the three siblings in Bergman’s 1972 Cries and Whispers. In another sequence, the shot composition of Gustav and his two daughters, their faces blending, recalls the iconic fusion of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces in Persona.
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It’s the acting that truly carries the film. Special mention goes to Renate Reinsve, who portrays the troubled yet talented Nora, and Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav, an actor unafraid to take on unlikable characters (I still remember him shooting a dog in the original Insomnia). In both cases, the subtle play of emotions—especially when those emotions are constrained—across the actors’ faces is a joy to watch. Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (who plays Agnes, the other sister with her own set of issues) are both excellent.
It’s hardly a Christmas movie, but more deeply, it’s a winter film, full of emotions set in a cold climate.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Laemmle Glendale, and AMC The Americana at Brand 18.
You can call me one-track-minded or say that I focus on the wrong things, but do not include an element that I am then expected to forget. Especially if that “element” is an animal – and a dog, even.
In No More Time, we meet a couple, and it takes quite some time before we suddenly see that they have a dog with them. It appears in a scene suddenly, because their sweet little dog has a purpose: A “meet-cute” with a girl who wants to pet their dog.
After that, the dog is rarely in the movie or mentioned. Sure, we see it in the background once or twice, but when something strange (or noisy) happens, it’s never around. This completely ruins the illusion for me. Part of the brilliance of having an animal with you during an apocalyptic event is that it can help you.
And yet, in No More Time, this is never truly utilized. It feels like a strange afterthought for that one scene with the girl to work, but as a dog lover, I am now invested in the dog. Not unlike in I Am Legend or Darryl’s dog in The Walking Dead. As such, this completely ruined the overall experience for me.
If it were just me, I could (sort of) live with it. But there’s a reason why an entire website is named after people demanding to know whether the dog dies, before they’ll decide if they’ll watch a movie.
The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who’s ready to lie, cheat, and steal for the chance to become the best in the world. This first film from director Josh Safdie since 2019’s Uncut Gems turns out to be a character study that “doubles as a cracked American success story,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Marty is a scrawny kid with a pathetic mustache, but he’s also a fast-talking grifter with supreme self-confidence, and his game earns him a trip to London and the world championship tournament before a humbling stokes his hunger for a comeback.
Surrounding Chalamet is “a supporting cast you’d swear was assembled via Mad Libs,” because it features Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and—as a faded movie star Marty sweet-talks into an affair—Gwyneth Paltrow, “reminding you how good she was before Goop became her full-time gig.” To me, it’s the story beneath the story that makes Safdie’s “nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating” movie one of the best of the year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of antisemitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.”
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‘Is This Thing On?’
Directed by Bradley Cooper (R)
★★★
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“There are far worse things that a gifted filmmaker could offer an audience these days than a feel-good divorce comedy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But it’s still slightly disappointing that screen star Bradley Cooper has followed up A Star Is Born and Maestro with this minor work, due Dec. 19, about a father of two who starts doing stand-up in New York City to cope with the likely end of his marriage. With Will Arnett and Laura Dern as its co-stars, Is This Thing On? is “an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie,” but it’s also so eager to hide the agonies of divorce that it “can feel like it’s cutting corners.”
The 124-minute film “doesn’t really get going until hour two,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Until then, it’s “lethargic and listless,” slowed by long takes “that drag on and on.” Fortunately, Arnett and Dern have real chemistry that kicks in when Dern’s Tess accidentally catches Arnett’s Alex performing his bit about their sidelined marriage and sees him with new eyes. Good as Arnett is, “it’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants and is figuring it out in real time,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Cooper, playing a reprobate friend of Alex’s, gives himself the script’s biggest laughs. More importantly, he proves again to be a director with “a real flair for domestic drama.”
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