2025 New York Film Festival Reviews: ‘After the Hunt,’ ‘Resurrection,’ ‘Sentimental Value’
We are about halfway through the New York Film Festival, aka the longest film festival of the year if you combine the press screening week leading up to the opening night film that then extends NYFF to almost a month long event for some who get to explore some of the best cinema of the year screening in the Lincoln Center area of town. In this review roundup out of the 2025 edition of NYFF, we explore the film that kicked off the festivities, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which is making its North American premiere after debuting at the Venice Film Festival out of competition, as well as two titles that premiered at Cannes earlier this year in Bi Gan’s Resurrection (North American premiere) and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (New York premiere). Each film discussed represents their filmmakers doing an exploration of truth through either academia, a broken family dynamic, or this history of Chinese cinema, leading to final acts that are either richly satisfying or disappointing; making for interesting, sometimes frustrating art from some of the best filmmakers we have working today.
After the Hunt (Dir. Luca Guadagnino)
When we first meet Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), she’s waking up, starting her day, kisses her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) goodbye, and heads to Yale, where she is one of the most respected professors on the campus. As we see her go through her day, we hear a ticking sound, one of a clock ticking and ticking, counting down to something that might turn everything in her life upside down. It’s this unnerving feels that lingers throughout After the Hunt, as the drama surrounding the aftermath of Alma’s protégée Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) being assaulted by Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), Alma’s fellow professor and friend, and her confession to Alma and how the professor deals with this personal, tricky relationship to both that builds and builds, with layers of ambiguity placed within the foundation of the script penned by Nora Garrett. The problem for Guadagnino’s film isn’t the build-up of this narrative drama, nor its ability to want explore academia and the racial, sexual power dynamics found within this profession that could lead to such a tanged event, but rather the film fumbles in the third act of landing a point that feels either fresh or subversive enough for the whole movie to matter in the first place.
Roberts and Stuhlbarg deliver good work that goes beyond the page due to their excellent chemistry as this intelligent couple who’ve been through it all and stand by each other’s side in the face of Maggie’s story hitting close to home for Alma in one of the silliest plot twists that movie tries to give in order to tie something from Alma’s past to Maggie’s present nightmare. Speaking of nightmares, that is the best way to describe the choice both Edebiri and Garfield, two fine actors, are making throughout this film, as both characters lack any intrigue or emotional connection for you to care if either side of the story here is compelling enough for the audience to care. Alongside a wasted, weird Chloë Sevigny, the majority of the supporting cast of After the Hunt have their hands tied behind their backs to support Robert’s performance because of a lackluster, surface level, amateur screenplay by Garrett who felt like she was desperately trying to make her version of TÁR without any of the dramatic, darkly comedic bite any of that film had. For the first time in his career, Guadagnino has made a project unworthy of his talents, and while his usual directorial flourishes are scattered across the film’s runtime, After the Hunt is a hollow exercise that wastes his and the audience’s time.
Grade: D+
Resurrection (Dir. Bi Gan)
In the near future, humans lose the ability to dream in Bi Gan’s latest science fiction dramatic epic, and in doing so, the world has been shut out of imagination and wonder. With very little rules set up, Gan explains that there are very few people left in the world that can dream, and they are known as “Fantasmers;” who also have the ability to live forever as a result of being able to keep dreaming alive. Chasing them are beings known as “The Other Ones,” whose job is to awaken the Fantasmers from their illusive, never-ending slumbers. When Miss Shu, an “Other One” finds a Fantasmers, naming him “Monster,” she uses an ancient technique to get through to the Fantasmers and explore his dreams before releasing him to an everlasting slumber; the power of image, aka cinematography. As we see throughout this opening sequences, it’s all shot as if it was the first film ever made, and as we explore the next five chapters of the film, and the ending, we see moments, events, stories of the Fantasmers’ life presented as not just a representation of the five human senses, but also five different styles of Chinese history and cinema, with the being’s future determined to end by the hands of the one who must perform her duty and put him to rest.
While not all of the sequences in Resurrection work on the whole, as the second following a father and son reconnecting at a temple and one about a vampire couple escaping the clutches of a Chinese gangster are lesser than the story about a mentor and his apprentice who learn through the power of perception to count cards or a noir, romantic police thriller toward the beginning of the film, one thing is clear is Gan’s directorial vision, as a running motif found in the film is use of a candle melting over time as each story is being told. It, alongside all the characters we see, come together beautifully in the final moments of the film, when Gan’s message about the future of cinema, and the memories we share up on the big screen are vital texts to the story of our lives. It’s a tender, elegant ending that washes away mostly all concerns found within the film and smacks you in the face with its glorious announcement of the power of history, films, and human connection. With only a few films under his belt, Bi Gan has fully announced himself as a commanding voice within world cinema; and that won’t melt away any time soon.
Grade: B+
Sentimental Value (Dir. Joachim Trier)
When you think back to your childhood, being in that first home, running around, collecting your first set of memories as a little human on this planet, how loud was it? Was your house filled with laughter, pain, anger, stillness, sorrow. In his opening for Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier describes the sounds and lives of the Borg family, mostly through the eyes and ears of Nora, who watched and listened to the events of her family crumble in front of her, as her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated director, walked out of the lives of her and her sister Agnes, as well as their mother. In that moment, the house missed a voice that made it whole, as it was house not only in Gustva’s family, but one that wasn’t complete without him, and thus is the launching point for Trier’s latest masterpiece, as the death of Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes’(Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) mother has brought their estranged father back into their lives, for professional as well as personal reasons. In getting to know his daughters again and returning home, Gustav has created what is believed to be his most personal screenplay yet and wants Nora to play the lead role, centering on a young mother that struggled with her life in Norway, and wants to shoot it in their family home; the same place his mother took her life and where their family endured torture from the Nazis during the war. Nora, an actress mostly on stage, doesn’t want to do it because working with her Dad is something she knows won’t be good for either of them in the long run, and as Gustva moves on an casts an American actress (Elle Fanning) in the role, Nora, alongside Agnes, start to explore the trauma of their childhood, leading them to confront not only their own personal demons of grief and sorrow, but also explore the idea that seems unfathomable to them mere months before the events of the film; forgiveness of their father and a chance to mend the broken hearted pieces of a once whole family.
Every performance in the film is sublime, starting with Reinsve who gives one of the best performances of the year and the best work of her career so far. In every small facial expression to quite moment of sadness to the fire she delivers her dialogue when standing opposite her co-stars, she gives Nora the well-roundedness the character needs for us to buy into what she is going through and rooting for her to find inner peace to move on from frustrations that linger within her. Skarsgård is excellent as Gustva, who in one moment can be prickly, stubborn and in the next minute the warm, gentle figure to his girls, grandson, and those who he is working on the film with. Stellar work can also be said for both Lilleaas and Fanning, both of whom gives small but effective work as two people struggling to find their place in the world and story that revolves around Gustav and Nora, who are so alike give their mutual attachment to the arts and strong personalities; it’s no wonder why they budded heads so much, because they are so alike they can’t be in the same space for such a long amount of time. This, along with every other detail found within these four characters and their connections to one another, is why Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt have written one of the best screenplays of the year, as we universally can relate to the struggles of a family through a painful history, the desire to want to resist confronting the mistakes of the past, and the urge to find a way to fix it while there still is a hope of reconciliation. Sentimental Value is a perfect, transcendent film that both remedies and enriches the soul.
Grade: A
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