Camerenth

Hamnet is a film that feels almost unbearably intimate, as if we've been granted access to a private grief that was never meant for our eyes. The lead actors deliver performances so raw and tremulous they feel lived-in rather than acted, turning every glance and hesitation into something quietly devastating. Each scene unfolds with the fragility of a memory you're afraid to touch and so close to melodrama and melancholy that it threatens to tip over, yet always pulls back into something truer. The film's restraint becomes its greatest power, allowing quiet ache to bloom where spectacle could have easily taken over.

By its final act, Hamnet reveals why this story had to be told at all. Everything, the lingering looks, the muted sorrow, the tension between love and loss, suddenly locks into place with heartbreaking clarity. If you know Shakespeare even a little, the film reshapes him entirely, reframing pieces of his legacy you didn't know were fractured. It is deeply moving in a way that feels personal and unguarded, the kind of emotional honesty that reaches in and gently breaks something open inside you. You will cry. Not because the film demands it, but because it earns it. It's slowly, intimately, profoundly.

Wicked: For Good can't escape its own structural contradictions as a second half of a story. The film drifts from scene to scene, struggling to create a strong narrative through-line while still serving as the long-awaited sequel and finale to this story. Yet for all the time it spends meandering, it also rushes through the moments that should matter most, especially the ones tied directly to The Wizard of Oz.

And that's part of the problem: it's unfortunate that many of the film's biggest emotional beats are beats we already know are coming. Instead of surprising us or deepening them, the movie often treats them as checklist items on the way to an ending we're already familiar with.

To its credit, the film's reinterpretations of the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion are genuinely refreshing. These sequences finally spark some life, showing us the kind of inventive perspective the movie could have leaned into more consistently.

Also the dialogue holds the movie back. Too often it feels cutesy for the sake of being quirky-characters say things that sound different, but rarely anything meaningful. As a result, major character shifts aren't earned, because the movie never gives them the emotional or thematic grounding they need.

Sentimental Value is a film carried by bold, bruising performances-Skarsgård isn't just a scene-stealer; he's the entire gravitational center. Every moment he's on screen, the film bends around him, pulling the audience into a portrait of trauma that's presented with no filter, no softening, no apologies.

The movie digs into the ripple effects of pain-the relationships it strains, the ones it quietly destroys, and the ones that can't survive under the weight of what's unspoken. It captures the heartbreaking truth that not everyone can understand, or even empathize with, a person who's endured too much. Instead, we see people avoid, retreat, and freeze, because confronting someone else's wounds means confronting their own.

The performances throughout feel startlingly real, grounded in raw emotional honesty. And the film keeps finding these unique, devastatingly intimate moments-scenes that don't feel written so much as lived. It's messy, human, and quietly overwhelming in all the right ways.