A profoundly moving portrait of a family reckoning with the painful memories embedded deep within the walls of their ancestral home, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finds the filmmaker reflecting once more on the existential themes—of time, love, identity, and history—that have abounded throughout his career.

The film reunites Trier with Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress whose performance in “The Worst Person in the World” earned her the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival; as a theater actress revisiting old wounds, her performance—opposite that of Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as her younger sister—distills the kind of agonized emotional clarity that has governed Trier’s recent work. 

Stellan Skarsgård stars as Gustav Borg, their father and a once-celebrated filmmaker whose efforts to repair his relationship with his two daughters are complicated by his interest in revisiting his own, fraught familial experience—including the suicide of his mother, who suffered during World War II under Nazi occupation, and whose lingering loss factors into this recent work. For Trier, the film is personal; his maternal grandfather, Erik Løchen, was one of Norway’s better-known filmmakers, as well as a jazz musician. During WWII, he was in the resistance and was captured, spending time in work camps and barely surviving; though that trauma lingered throughout his life, Trier believes his grandfather made films in part to process his pain. His presence is indirectly felt in “Sentimental Value” through the voiceover narration of Bente Børsum, who appeared in Løchen’s “The Hunt.”

Ahead of “Sentimental Value” opening in theaters, Trier sat down for a wide-ranging discussion of his film’s poignant themes, the challenges and joys of working with time, his unique personal connection to this story, the inescapable influence of Ingmar Bergman, and much more. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I’ve always felt that you identify so strongly with your characters—that the empathy of your filmmaking flows from your impulse to understand and connect with them. You come from a film family, and I’m curious about drawing on that personal experience in shaping the characters of Gustav Borg, his daughters, and Rachel Kemp. 

It’s true. I think the idea of identification comes first from a writer’s point of view, then from a director’s, and finally from a collaboration with the actors. I need to understand them and identify their yearnings and their struggles. But that’s not the same as saying that the characters are biographically like me, or that you don’t need to vary up the characters. Still, this is a polyphonic kind of story, and so it’s nice to have that identification. 

For example, Gustav is a film director. As you say, absolutely correctly, I come from a film family background. Without him being anyone I know, I understand the struggles and the joys, the passion for making films, so I identify with that—and also the anxiety, perhaps, that it will come to an end, that “one day they won’t let me,” which is what he’s going through. But this film was also about having characters like the younger sister, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who was in Gustav’s film as a child and certainly didn’t want to be in front of the camera again—something completely different. 

With her, for example, I found this identifiable point: she wants everyone to connect and feel good. I have that in me. I always want people to get along. You do find something with all of them, after a while, when working on them. But the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t want to hinder the possibility of the actors coming in and taking charge of the characters. It’s good to leave an open space for them to fill in, as well.

The term you use, “polyphonic,” refers specifically to sound. I’m curious about your creative relationship to music, score, and especially sound design, as this was your father’s craft. Your film opens and closes with two wonderful tracks, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cassock Chase,” but how do you think about the role of sound design in your filmmaking?

Thank you very much for asking that. I really care about it. When I talk to friends about using music in film, I also tell them that one of the joys of life is the system of loudspeakers and the richness of frequency you get in a good cinema. It’s the best sound you’ll hear anywhere in the world. It’s a super hi-fi, complex, surround-sound experience. I feel that sometimes filmmakers forget how subtle you can be while still including a lot of sound and using the full range of frequencies. Hammering, loud sound doesn’t necessarily use the possibilities of a theater.

That’s something I think I’ve learned from my father: that you can create what feels like silence but is actually a full sound design of atmospheric subtlety. I love loud pieces of music; I love noise, but I also love the dynamics of daring to be quiet and gentle with sound. It’s almost like you draw the audience into the image by being very cautious about sound in certain areas.

For example, towards the end, there’s an almost climactic scene between the two sisters, full of emotion and action. And there’s no music. I tried to really build towards that feeling of presence: being there, hearing the breathing, all the movements of clothes. That can ultimately be so strong. Sometimes, when it comes to people talking about sound, they always talk about the loud films—And I think that the opposite could be equally complex and interesting.

Everyone has a childhood home, a place where they grew up; this film explores the poetics of such a location. You’ve referred to the house as a “witness of the unspoken.” But there’s an emotional residue in the house’s atmosphere; it reflects all this lived experience. What can you say about first conceiving of the house and its presence, and of mapping your story onto this setting once you had a physical location?

First of all, our spatial treatment of the narrative—to refine it so that it fit the space—was an exciting, visual task. When we write, Eskil Vogt and I write for the image in a way, and for the actors, but I think the sound aspect is really interesting as well. 

Hania Rani was our wonderful composer; this was the first collaboration I’ve had with her. She wanted to go to the house and record its reverb and other sonic qualities, which, to me, was fascinating. I’ve never had anyone think like that, but she said it inspired and affected her approach to reverbs for certain pieces of music as well. The idea of sound always being present is very interesting to me.

And to elaborate on that spatial treatment of the narrative, this film required characters to move between rooms and down corridors, and it needed a location with a room that could be dressed to play different roles over time. We first see Nora enter the house through what had been her mother’s psychology office, where there’s still an empty chair… How much did the story change once you had a location, and how much did the narrative dictate the location you were looking for?

It was a bit of both. The first draft contained pretty much the story you see in the film, but the relationship between the upstairs and downstairs—and that hallway corridor towards the room where such dramatic events we realize throughout the story had occurred, all of that repetition of angles that is so fun to play with in movies—I think this house really gave itself to that. Along with our wonderful production designer, Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, we also built a replica of the house. In addition to shooting in the real house, we had a studio version so we could go between them. 

The studio version got dressed for every 10 years of the 20th century, with different wallpapers and different moods. A lot of that was done through research; we also had in the studio these VP walls—virtual production walls—where we created an exterior, based on research, photo-realistically showing how foliage grew over time and how buildings were erected suddenly as others disappeared. We drew a map of time through the house and its surroundings.

You actually built a replica of the Borg family house on a soundstage to film a montage of the house across generations. What effect did that have for you, given the relevance of that filmmaking technique to the story? Gustav is so fixated on filming this deeply personal story in the actual house where so much has happened. 

I’m primarily a location director, so I always feel it’s wonderful to look out the window and receive a gift, as something will happen that makes it feel close to life. But, actually, with the team we had, the studio experience was wonderful, as was the feeling of being able to create specific moods with a lot of control. So, control and chaos were both alive in this process, in new and unusual ways for me.

The replica house made me think about how directly you depict time in this film. How has your temperament toward dealing with time, which you’ve described as one of the primary aesthetic considerations a filmmaker can have, evolved with this film?

It’s such a great question, and it’s an essential one to the core of this story. The aspect of time begins with the film’s opening, which shows Nora, the eldest daughter, and her essay on the house’s perception of her family history. It’s the idea that, for the house, a human life is very short, because the house is a constant, in a way; it’s this longer, lasting structure. I thought that was a nice setup for a story about reconciliation, where the adult realization of the sisters that they’re not going to have their father around forever—even though he’s a complicated character—means they, in their own individual ways, have to reconcile their relationship with him. 

That’s one aspect, but it’s also a possibility to put the idea of social history into context when we realize through the film that the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Norway were affecting the lives of families, and many people’s lives, in ways that still impact us. Many people say that a war trauma takes three generations before it lets go. For people who haven’t seen the film yet, that’s not in the forefront of the story, but it’s there in the house, and the idea of the house witnessing life helps us tell that story.

It’s Agnes who seeks out more knowledge about her grandmother’s experiences during the war, and this has a profound effect on her. It’s my understanding you’ve personally been through that process of tracing your family history back into that conflict.

My grandfather was in the resistance during the war; he was captured and spent time imprisoned by the Nazis across two different camps, and he was very traumatized by that. He made films after the war, and I think that was a way to survive and find a place in the world again. He was creating something and seeking meaning in it. 

I think that’s at the core of the process of making this film for me, but also the idea of the National Archive, the accounting of facts in a society, is fundamental. It’s a different narrative from the fictional one of the National Theater, where the older sister works; it’s the historical aspect of how necessary it is for democracy and society to hold themselves accountable to facts. 

I found, through a piece of paper, a witness to the accounts of my grandfather’s imprisonment. It’s provable. No one can deny there’s proof that a terrible thing happened to him. With where the world is right now, that’s a very important thing to remember: that we need to learn from history. And I think the film asks this question of the ambivalence of history and memory. On one level, we need to forget, to forgive a difficult parent.

On the other hand, we owe it to the past to remember certain things, not to repeat those faults. And we owe it to the people who experienced certain things. That’s the space where we live in time, in between those two notions.

It’s better to live in impermanence than in any kind of finality, in how we reconcile with the past.

Life is a process—and making films is a process. Now that I have talked a bit about this film, and you’re asking me about memory and time and our relation to it—and also the process of making a film—there’s always that retrospective narrative that now is slowly being created as I’m talking to journalists. 

But it’s a narrative that will never quite mirror the process, because in making it, you’re lost along the way. You think it’s about something, then you discover something else. It’s ongoing, but it’s nice, at the end, to try to summarize: “What the hell did we make?” and to meet people who can mirror it back to us.

To bring Gustav into that theme of excavating memory… Nora works within the theater, and Agnes explores the archives. As we see in Deauville, during a retrospective of his work, Gustav has been speaking through his art, making films like the one whose ending we see: a wartime drama about an orphan’s ordeal. What is he reckoning with? 

“Anna,” yes. We thought a lot about that, actually, since we knew that Gustav is a character who’s quite clumsy at relating to people socially, particularly his family and his daughters, but whom we realize has a more sophisticated, emotionally engaging way to create art. It was very important that those films expressed some aspect of him; in the piece of his film we see, though more pieces didn’t make it into the final cut, the ending of “Anna” obviously deals with some sense of survivor’s guilt. 

We later realize perhaps why that is a major theme with him. It was important for us to use everything in this film to get into character and to explain the layers of observation about human beings’ incapacity for communication, while still revealing them. That was an interesting way into him, the films.

Gustav speaks through his art in a way that he cannot in life; with the film he wants to make, it’s about his mother and his daughter, but it’s also about him. He’s trying to express something deeply personal by speaking through them. But one wonders whether he wrote this script specifically to bring about personal reconciliation, or whether he wrote it to revitalize his career because he knew it would be creatively stimulating. 

My feeling is that you have a really great understanding of the complexity of that in your question, and I’m almost hesitant to answer, because I think you’ve put it very beautifully. There are a lot of different things going on with him, I think you’re right. It’s interesting for the audience to consider whether Gustav’s primary urge is reconciliation. Does he want to do something with his daughter? Or is it primarily just wanting to make a film? Or is it mainly to resolve his relationship with his mother and the trauma around her death? Or is it everything, and he’s confused, and he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t quite have to know, because at the end of the day, he knows how to craft a movie, and that’s what he does? All of those things could be playing out at different levels of his psyche at the same time or at different times.

Tell me about your relationship with both Eskil Vogt, your co-writer, and Olivier Bugge Coutté, your editor. You’re long-time collaborators. How do you work together? 

Those two are people I’ve worked with since my short films and have made all six features with. I think Eskil is a starting point, then he leaves the project for a while, and I go and direct it—he’s not very involved at that point—and then, halfway through the edit, Olivier and I feel we have reached a place where we need feedback, so we show it to Eskil, and he comes back in. We sometimes have terrible arguments, but we always end up friends, all of us.

Olivier is all about what is actually at play in the material, and what the best version is now, while Eskil sometimes reminds us of the thematic complexities we shouldn’t lose. I’m the director in the middle, trying to listen as skillfully as I can to these smart people, to try to get it to land in the right place. It’s one of the most exciting things to have collaborators you’ve worked with for a long time. You have shorthand, so you can go deep quickly and get into the core of the challenges every new film will automatically present. It’s tricky making films and getting the balance right. That’s the art of it.

To the point, I felt your use of close-ups on your actors’ faces was beautifully balanced in this film. I know that’s been a fascination of yours through your career—and I love this film’s reference to “The Piano Teacher,” a film featuring one of the most unforgettable close-up shots: at the end, her with the knife. What’s the secret to maintaining that kind of proximity with actors, and what’s your process of knowing when you’ve found what you’re looking for in an actor’s expression?

I sit next to the camera and have a handheld monitor to check the frame, but I look at them with my eyes and try to feel what’s going on. That’s the best way of judging it. There is a very inspiring clip of Ingmar Bergman on set for one of his last films, in which an actor questions whether they got it right. And Bergman says something along the lines of, “Well, I felt it, and I don’t squander emotions with you guys. Let’s move on. I’m sure we could do a million other great versions, but I felt it now, so I’m done with this. Let’s move on.” 

At the end of the day, we try a lot of variations, but if I feel that we’ve explored it properly, it’s not a rational thing. You’ve got to trust your gut and say to the actor, “I’m really pleased with this. Thank you. You gave me a lot of your experience of the scene. Let’s move on.” And that’s the art again: when do you call it? There’s a programmatic side to it, of course, having limited time and all that. But I felt that, in this one, we got to explore the material at hand deeply. I’m very grateful and happy for that.

I’m glad you brought up Bergman. One film I sense reflecting into this one, and not just because of the family Borg, is “Wild Strawberries.” I’m curious about how film influences you. But to frame that question more expansively, “Sentimental Value” is narrated by the Norwegian actress Bente Børsum, now 93, who worked with your grandfather on “The Hunt.” How did you think, with this film, about working with both your own family’s history and this larger lineage of Scandinavian cinema?

There are a lot of interesting things to talk about there. I’ll start with Bente, and then go to Bergman. Yes, Bente played the lead in my grandfather’s 1960 film, “The Hunt”; both were very young. It was her first lead role. It was his first film.

Long story short, I actually have a gym close to my house where there are a lot of old people present—a physiotherapy center, really—where it’s cheap to go and work out. And I went there and suddenly felt very young amongst all the old people; suddenly, I realized that Bente Børsum was there. I’d just met her briefly, but we got to know each other. We met there on Sundays, sometimes during our workouts/ I thought, “What a magnificent chance to work with her.” I never really had a part I could offer, but I could do the narration, and it suddenly clicked that she knew my grandfather.

She also has this beautiful narration about Agnes going to the National Archive, which you and I spoke about earlier, and she could talk about those things with great authority, as her mother was captured during the war. I know that’s a very dear theme to her: the grief and woundedness of the war, even though it was so long ago, she still carries that. That was a really wonderful thing, to have a little homage back to my grandfather’s first film.

When it comes to Bergman, I am very happy you brought up “Wild Strawberries.” That’s such a gentle yet deeply melancholic film about an old man asking questions of whether he lived the life he was supposed to. Did he connect, or why didn’t he connect with certain people? I think that’s very relevant to Gustav’s story. 

It’s hard to talk about Bergman because he’s at play in so many indirect and unconscious ways for me, I’m sure. It’s always a problem when I say at home that Bergman inspires me; everyone wants to take me down a notch. “Oh, you’re not Bergman. He was much greater.” I’ve had a couple of asshole critics who are, like, “Oh, he thinks he’s Bergman.” I never thought I was anything. Ozu from Japan inspires me, as do many American filmmakers, as well as Bergman. 

It’s just the ongoing process of being a film lover and seeing what film is capable of, trying to take that energy and bring it somewhere else. I think that’s unavoidable—because I’m Scandinavian, everyone thinks it’s Bergman, and that’s not a lie, but it’s so many other things as well, is my point. [laughs]

“Sentimental Value” is now playing in select theaters, via Neon. 

The final episode of Cooper Raiff‘s eight-part series, “Hal & Harper,” opens with a dedication: “For parents and the parentified.” At its best, the show evokes that love and care for the struggles and anxieties of parenthood, and the arrested development that comes when children are forced to parent themselves. As a young filmmaker with two attention-grabbing features already under his belt—2020’s “Shithouse” and 2022’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth“—Raiff’s work has often dealt with the tensions of growing up and putting away childish things. But here it’s told with remarkable patience and self-assurance, even as Raiff often gets in his own way.

Told in elliptical, time-jumping fashion across decades, “Hal & Harper” holds its focus on a struggling family coping poorly with loss and trauma; we quickly clue in that the mother dies tragically when both kids are very young, freezing them emotionally in place. The titular kids are the jittery Hal (Raiff) and his older sister Harper (an incredible Lili Reinhart), first seen in their early twenties, still figuring their lives out. Hal feels like a manchild who’s coasting through college with a best friend who tells him that he’s “not, like, a person sometimes,” all raw nerves and people-pleasing eagerness.

Harper, meanwhile, is freshly out of college, toiling away at an entry-level desk job and in a six-year relationship with her first love, Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott), whom she can’t bring herself to leave, even though she’s already checked out. A fling with a coworker (Addison Timlin, also a producer) offers her the chance for something exciting and new. Still, she’s stuck: Stuck in the limbo of her existing connections with Jesse, Hal, and her guilt-ridden father (Mark Ruffalo). They’re all so dependent on each other in ways that can offer peace but also hold them back; Hal and Harper’s lack of boundaries, even in adulthood, quickly registers as unhealthy.

While the first two episodes cement the show’s montage-y, impressionistic nature—much of the show’s runtime plays out in airy intercuts set to weepy indie-folk needledrops from acts like Phoebe Bridgers and Waxahatchee—it’s at the end of ep 2 that we see one of Raiff’s more ambitious stylistic choices: We cut back to 2009, as Hal and Harper enter first and third grades. Instead of casting kids, the twentysomething Raiff and Reinhart play the roles instead; the former adjusts his physicality to play around with preteen clumsiness, while Reinhart’s Harper still smokes and makes jokes about drinking. “You really had to grow up way too fast,” Dad says to them and us, hammering home this conceit.

It’s a cloying, on-the-nose moment to sell the vibe, and “Hal & Harper” has a lot of these. When watched all at once, the show’s sleepy, waxy tone can sometimes grate, as the overwhelming gentleness of its presentation and the simplistic, fuzzy-wuzzy dramedy wear thin.

That attitude is all over Raiff’s work, especially “Cha Cha”; especially on screen, Raiff’s presence is somewhat of a weak point, as his wide-eyed enthusiasm can whittle away his more charming moments as an actor. His works feel singularly focused on the dissonance between childhood and adulthood, and the pull towards the simplicity of childhood to keep oneself safe.

“Hal & Harper” makes merry play with the divide between adults who can’t leave their childhoods behind and are a bit too grown-up to do childhood right. The beats that explore that frisson are some of the show’s most successful. The problem comes from the show’s awkward, stuttering structure. Because we flit back and forth so much in time, it’s hard to get a grasp on these characters or their conflicts, and they don’t get a chance to build organically.

Structuring a show achronologically should create purpose in those intercuts; alas, we’re left juggling two or three different conflicts at once that don’t resolve satisfactorily. Certain subplots, like Dad’s girlfriend (an underused Betty Gilpin) struggling against the possibility of their unborn child having Down’s Syndrome, feel tacked-on and perfunctory, and the broader question of “can they deal with selling their childhood home?” doesn’t ripple out boldly enough into their wider lives to feel important.

What elevates the show’s hazy presentation, though, is the performances of Reinhart and Ruffalo, each of whom finds remarkable grace notes in their thorny, complicated characters. Reinhart’s Harper feels like the adult of the family, for lack of a better term; she’s always had to take care of Hal and her father to some extent, and this moment in her life plays out like a deeply painful crossroads. She’s a fuckup, trapped in cycles of self-destructive behavior because she doesn’t know what she wants. Reinhart’s expressive face speaks volumes, whether it’s guilt, memory, or conflict, in ways the sparse, overly sentimental script doesn’t allow her.

Ruffalo, for his part, is often off in his own show, as the emotionally closed-off father who turns inward to deal with his trauma. It somewhat isolates his character from the rest of the show, but it gives him a beautiful showcase to mark his weathered, hangdog expression, filled with decades of grief and sorrow, in ways that resonate when he’s the focus.

When we deal with loss, time can seem to stand still. I know; as I type this, I am myself waiting to hear whether my maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family, will pass today. It’s one of those terrifying prospects that no amount of emotional fortification can truly prepare you for. In its final hour, especially, “Hal & Harper” captures the bittersweet nature of change and how closing one chapter can help you open up another. But perhaps that’s evidence enough that there’s a solid three-star movie’s worth of concept here, rather than stretching it out to a loose, thin five-hour television series.

Whole season screened for review. Premieres on MUBI October 19.

Ask 100 fans to name their favorite football movie, and you’ll probably get at least 30 different responses, from comedy-dramas such as “The Longest Yard” (both Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler versions), “Semi-Tough” (1977), “Varsity Blues” (1999), and “The Waterboy” (1998) to earnest dramas including “Knute Rockne, All American” (1940), as well as “We Are Marshall” (2006), “The Express: The Ernie Davis Story” (2008), “The Blind Side” (2009), and “Concussion” (2015).

Worthy contenders, but not quite strong enough to make my starting lineup of the 11 Best Football Movies of All Time.

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11. “Any Given Sunday” (1999)

Oliver Stone indulges in a running time (2 hours and 42 minutes) that nearly matches the length of an NFL game, filming “Any Given Sunday” like a war movie—peppering us with whip pans and hyperreal action sequences, handheld camerawork, and slo-mo. The screenplay is filled with football clichés, e.g., the traditional coach (Al Pacino) who has given his life to the game vs. the coldly calculating new owner/general manager (Cameron Diaz), and the aging star quarterback (Dennis Quaid) giving way to the talented but narcissistic younger showboat (Jamie Foxx)—but the star-studded cast sells the material. This is one of those “alternate universe” football films, set in the fictional AFFA (Affiliated Football Franchises of America) and featuring teams with entertainingly goofy names such as the Chicago Rhinos, the Washington Lumbermen, the Kansas Twisters, and the Wisconsin Icemen. Still, storylines such as the thread about an unscrupulous team physician (James Woods) carry real-world impact, and the football scenes deliver a visceral wallop.

Available on VOD.

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10. “Remember the Titans” (2000)

As is the case with “The Blind Side,” the legacy of “Remember the Titans” is complicated, as many of the key sequences in the film bear little or no resemblance to the true story upon which it is based, and the late coach Herman Boone was eventually fired. Still, as a fictional dramatic film loosely based on a real-life story, “Remember the Titans” contains essential truths about high school football against the backdrop of the South in the early 1970s. Denzel Washington infuses an electric authority to his portrayal of the coach, with the invaluable character actor Will Patton bringing humanity to the role of Coach Bill Yoast, who initially undermines Boone but eventually teams up with him.

On Disney+.

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9. “Draft Day” (2014)

Ivan Reitman’s front office sports drama is often overlooked in the pantheon of Kevin Costner sports movies—but it’s one of those comfort-viewing, actor-friendly movies that plays well on a lazy Saturday afternoon or a late-night click around the channels. (People still click around the channels, right?) It’s a kind of “Jerry Maguire” meets “Moneyball” storyline, with Costner easing comfortably into the role of Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver Jr., who on the morning of the 2014 draft has to figure out how to best use the 7th overall pick, all the while dealing with soap-opera complications in his personal life, most prominently the fact his girlfriend Ali (Jennifer Garner), the team’s financial analyst, is pregnant. The supporting cast is fantastic, with everyone from Denis Leary to Frank Langella to Sam Elliott to Ellen Burstyn to Rosanna Arquette popping in—as well as the late Chadwick Boseman as top Ohio State prospect Vontae Mack. Given the ways in which the NFL has turned the draft into a multi-day extravaganza with high-end production values, “Draft Day” is already starting to feel like a quaint period piece.

Available on VOD.

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8. “Rudy” (1993)

With “Breaking Away,” “Hoosiers,” and “Rudy,” three of the most inspirational sports-related movies of all time were set in Indiana—with the latter two directed by David Anspaugh, a native of Decatur, Ind., and an Indiana University alum. The likable Sean Astin captures the real-life Rudy Ruettiger’s indefatigable (and yes, sometimes exhausting) determination to join the University of Notre Dame football team, despite being comically undersized and without any skill set beyond persistence and guts. Ned Beatty as Rudy’s father, Charles S. Dutton as the groundskeeper who becomes Rudy’s mentor (you’ve probably seen the famous “clapping” GIF), and Robert Prosky as a Catholic priest are all playing movie tropes, but they’re such fine actors that they elevate the material. Just as “Moneyball” unfairly maligned former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe, “Rudy” does former Notre Dame coach Dan Devine wrong, and that’s a shame—but again, these are fictionalized versions based on true events. We need conflict and resistance to create an underdog story. “Rudy” is an unabashedly sentimental tale, and even if you’re a USC fan and you hate Notre Dame, I defy you to watch it without cheering for that little dude.

On Netflix.

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7. “The Program” (1993)

You can’t get much further from the hip-hip-hooray tone of “Rudy” than “The Program,” which arrived in theaters just three weeks prior to “Rudy” in the fall of 1993. Director and co-writer David S. Ward embraces some upbeat college football-movie clichés—but also explores the dark side of the sport, with plotlines about wealthy alumni, athletes receiving special treatment in the classroom, alcoholism, and the use of anabolic steroids. (When two assistant coaches witness a roided-up lineman smashing in car windows with his head, they opt not to tell the head coach, but to warn the player about upcoming testing, so he can figure out a way around it.) Like his “Godfather” brother Al Pacino in “Any Given Sunday,” the great James Caan brings a growling, paternal authenticity to the role of the head coach, and the supporting cast features a number of bright young talents, including Halle Berry, Craig Sheffer, Kristy Swanson, and Omar Epps.

On VOD.

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6. “Jerry Maguire” (1996)

Nothing against sports agents—I know a couple of sports agents, and they’re fine people—but there’s still something miraculous about Cameron Crowe putting an agent at the center of the most quoted sports movie of all time. By this point, “Show me the money!”, “You complete me,” and “You had me at hello” are years past their saturation dates, but when you rewatch “Jerry Maguire” and revisit the lines in context, they really click. Tom Cruise is in prime movie star form as the titular character, who by the end of the story has come to genuinely believe in his mission statement. Renée Zellweger brings depth and substance to a role that admittedly has a bit of a stuck-in-the-1950s mentality. And yes, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays to the rafters in a part tailor-made for a Best Supporting Actor award—but he’s a hilarious force as an undersized receiver with a big heart whose mantra is show me the money – but only because that money is for him to take care of his family.

On VOD.

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5. “Friday Night Lights” (2004)

One of the things I love about Peter Berg’s high school football classic is how it emphasizes that only one or two Permian Panthers truly possess the size and talent to play at the next level. Unlike the powerhouse Dallas Carter team, with a roster that included more than 20 players who were offered college scholarships, for the vast majority of the Permian squad, Friday night was the end of the road—which only increases the pressure on these 17-year-olds to come through for an entire town that lives vicariously through them. “FNL” is filled with adults behaving badly and making terrible decisions, e.g., Tim McGraw’s alcoholic father abusing his son (Garrett Hedlund) because the boy doesn’t have his talents, and L.V. Miles (Grover Coulson) encouraging his nephew and ward Boobie (Derek Luke) to play against medical advice. We reel from their actions, but we understand why these men are so desperate. Their time has come and gone. The high school football careers of their loved ones are all they’ve got, and they act accordingly. That’s wrong, and terribly, terribly sad—but it makes for compelling drama.

On Netflix and Starz.

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4. “Brian’s Song” (1971)

An all-time “guy cry” classic. This 1971 ABC Movie of the Week about the special friendship between Chicago Bears star running back Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) and the brash free agent turned fullback Brian Piccolo (James Caan, making his second appearance on this list), who died of cancer at 26, was such a spectacular success that it was subsequently shown in theaters, with a major premiere at the Michael Todd Theatre in Chicago. Sayers and Piccolo were the first interracial roommates in the NFL, and the film handles the issue directly and with grace and warm humor, with Williams and Caan exuding tremendous buddy-film chemistry. Especially in the 1970s, television directors and writers were considered second-tier talents to filmmakers—but in adapting an excerpt from Sayers’ book “I Am Third,” director Buzz Kulik (whose résumé includes the legendary anthology series “Playhouse 90” and multiple episodes of “The Twilight Zone”) and writer William Blinn (whose credits extend from episodes of “Rawhide” and “Gunsmoke” to co-writing “Purple Rain,” how about that) created a beautiful piece of work.

On VOD.

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3. “All the Right Moves” (1983)

More than any other film on this list, Michael Chapman’s Pennsylvania steel town football drama resonates with me, because it struck so many parallels to my own experiences under the Friday Night Lights as a thoroughly ordinary backup tight end and special teams player for the Thornridge Falcons in Dolton, Ill. (Hometown of the Pope!) Two months after Tom Cruise’s star-making turn as a rich-kid high school schemer in “Risky Business,” Cruise gives a much more grounded and even more impressive performance as defensive back “Stef” Djordjevic, whose clashes with his hard-nosed coach (a forceful Craig T. Nelson, years before he played a sitcom coach) could kill Stef’s dream of earning a college ride so he can study engineering and break the generational cycle of a back-breaking life toiling in the steel mills. (If the mills even stay open.) Twenty years before the film version of “Friday Night Lights,” here was a movie that perfectly captured the intensity, the glory, and the pressures of small-town high school football.

On VOD.

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2. “Heaven Can Wait” (1978)

Oh, how I love this film. Warren Beatty, who co-directed with Buck Henry and co-wrote the screenplay with Elaine May, gives one of the most endearing performances of his career as Joe Pendleton, a backup quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams who is plucked from the Earth before his time, returns in the body of millionaire industrialist Leo Farnsworth, buys the team, and installs himself as the starting QB. The soprano saxophone moment (when Jack Warden’s Max Corkle realizes this Farnsworth guy really is his old friend Joe) is hilarious but sweet, and the love story between Joe and Julie Christie’s Betty is beautiful and touching, transcending life and death, leading us to believe in romantic destiny.

On VOD.

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1. “North Dallas Forty”

In the late 1970s, just as pro football was reaching unprecedented levels of popularity and solidifying its standing as the dominant TV sport in America, along came the subversive, cynical, biting, and hilariously on-point “North Dallas Forty” to slice and dice the sanitized mythology of the game. Based on the terrific satirical novel by former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent, “North Dallas Forty” is both a love letter to football—and a scathing indictment of ownership that treats players like expendable commodities, with little regard for their health or their futures. Nick Nolte delivered empathetic anti-hero work as the aging and ever-rebellious wide receiver Phil Elliott, who is becoming increasingly dependent on painkillers. Meanwhile, the amiable country singer Mac Davis was a revelation as the star quarterback, Seth Maxwell, a pragmatic company man. The invaluable G.D. Spradlin mirrors the all-business persona of the Tom Landry-esque head coach. At the same time, the late great John Matuszak, essentially playing himself, delivers a Hall of Fame-level locker room tirade at Charles Durning’s unctuous assistant coach: “Job, Job, I don’t want no fucking job, I want to play football, you asshole…I want some fucking team spirit…Every time I call it a game, you call it a business, and every time I call it a business, you call it a game!”

On VOD and free on Hoopla.

We are extremely proud to present an excerpt from a new book about “The Crow,” available today. Alisha Mughal, who has written pieces for us about “Fatal Attraction,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and more, has written It Can’t Rain All the Time. Get a copy here.

The official synopsis:

It Can’t Rain All the Time weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance.

A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity

Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”

In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable.

Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.

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A depressive episode begins as a slow and steady sinking feeling, like being lowered inch by inch into a grave. I feel it build over the course of a couple of days or sometimes even a week. I grow irritable, and my moods begin to turn putrid as negative thoughts lay roots. As my body grows tired, the thoughts become a forest. The episode has set in.

When I was younger, I was consumed by the muck of sadness, and many times, I almost didn’t make it out. Now I’m on medication, which doesn’t completely stop the episodes but does allow me a remove, a distance from which I can make decisions to help myself. I’ve learned that the only thing I can do is to let these episodes play out, allow them to peak and then fade and then, eventually, recede. This takes time. Sometimes I watch movies as the hours pass.

The first time I watch The Crow is during a depressive episode at the beginning of the summer I turn 29. Scrolling through the horror streaming platform Shudder, I see the film’s poster image one empty evening. It’s still light out, and I hear sounds that never fail to make me feel like the loneliest person in the world: people laughing, children playing. I vaguely recall the film’s association with some kind of catastrophe, which I learned about from online critic Marya E. Gates years ago. In the state that I’m in in my darkening bedroom — my eyes sore and my mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton balls — I can’t recall much else about the film.

As I’m staring numbly at the screen, my sleepy attention is piqued by the poster’s suffocating darkness stained with the red gash of a title: it’s a heavy black relieved only by the lead actor’s name and a steely gray-white light, like a doorway just opened onto something magnificent. “Believe in angels,” the film’s tagline, framed in the light, advises. On the threshold, a small and menacing figure is visible as if in relief, his arms hang as a sentence cut short, flexed at his sides, making him look like a panther about to pounce — he is as dark as the velvety black on the poster’s body. He is walking toward the viewer, perennially. It is a moody image, sinister and gothic, and, on this empty evening, it complements my melancholic insides, so I press play.

A horror overcomes me. I see Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven lying dead on the street after being thrown from his apartment window and then crawling his way out of a muddy grave moments later, screaming and wailing from the pain of a macabre rebirth. When I hear Eric speak for the first time in the movie — he whispers his cat’s name, Gabriel — his voice low and gravelly from the strain of life so recently shocked into him, I turn the film off and weep. I can’t finish it. Not yet.

Lee’s stature, his voice, his rain-sodden hair — it all reminds me of a person I am trying very hard to forget. “It hurts to watch because you look so much like him,” I say when I manage to see him a few weeks later, the first time in a year. The Boy I Was Trying to Forget isn’t exactly the direct cause of my sadness. It’s my own unreciprocated and unbearably heavy feelings for him that leave me feeling unmoored, which then feed into the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. Everything becomes so dire, so tangled, because of and within my mind.

It might seem anticlimactic or boring or unimportant, maybe even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination with The Crow was first sparked by a man who didn’t like me back. But it’s the truth.

Later that summer, it finally dawns on me that he, the person whose loss I ought to be able to deal with, would never change his mind about me. And it is only at this point, when I understand that my hope will not be enough, that I will have to deal with the finality of his indifference to me — that I sit myself down and watch The Crow in its entirety.

And then I watch it again, and again, and again. Every night that I am sad and weeping, every night that I feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief lost at sea (so much elaborate intricacy, so much feeling, all wasted), I put it on. The first time I visit one of my dearest friends in San Francisco, I talk her into watching it with me. It is her first time. We suck gin gimlets through puckered lips, and I become teary-eyed watching Eric Draven twirl and charge and weep and wail.

Now two years have gone by, and I’ve come to realize that I turned to The Crow so often that first summer because it was a way to avoid reality, a way to avoid countenancing and mourning and moving on from the end of a connection. The film allowed me closeness with a person who was far away and would never come near. He wasn’t dead, but this was worse, I once thought with self-pitying conviction. When a loved one dies, you at least have the assurance that there had been love. But this, of course, was a false comparison; it is objectively not preferable to lose someone to death. Still, that certainty I once felt was deeply, pleasingly maudlin, a kind of gothic romanticism. Just like everything I love about The Crow.

Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow is based on a graphic novel of the same name by James O’Barr. It was released in 1994 after a fraught production period beleaguered by time constraints, delays, and mishaps. Hurricanes tumbled through the miniature city Proyas had built, crew members suffered accidents, and, most notably, lead actor Brandon Lee died on set due to a misfired, misloaded, and mishandled prop gun. During filming, in the face of so many accidents, many on set thought the film was cursed.¹ It was well-received by critics, with nearly everyone noting the irony of a lead actor dying during production for a film about a character brought back from the dead. Roger Ebert stated that Lee’s performance is “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”² The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the film is “filled with style and dark, lurid energy,” and that it carries “a soul in the performance of the late Brandon Lee.”³

It made a lot of money, was considered a sleeper hit at the box office, and spawned three standalone sequels that are, honestly, very terrible. Today, the film has a devoted cult following. At screenings, some fans dress up as Eric Draven, painting their faces black and white and caping their bodies in a glossy black flowing trench coat. Sometimes, they adhere a prop crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal that serves as a shepherd and guide and spiritual conduit for Eric’s soul. There are some critics, though, who wonder whether this movie would still have a devoted following were it not for the real-life tragedy.

The first time I saw the film in a theater, some audience members laughed during scenes that, to me, were never very funny. At one point, Eric, after arming himself with all manner of weapons at a pawn shop (where he also recovers his dead fiancée’s ring), picks up an electric guitar. The unplugged guitar moans: its strings, as Eric carries it away, vibrate, creating a ghostly boing-oing-oing. Watching the film with an audience, I could see how that scene, the juxtaposition of guns with a guitar, could seem a bit funny — a man arming himself ahead of battle takes only the most important things. Surely a guitar is a bit too extravagant? But at the same time, I wanted to shush everyone. Couldn’t they see that the guitar is important to Eric, a musician, just as much as the ring? To laugh is to misunderstand Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and everything is significant. People laughed nonetheless, and at other moments, too, when things became a bit clunky and ludicrous.

“Very bizarre situations are often darkly funny,” said supporting cast member David Patrick Kelly in a behind-the-scenes interview for The Crow,⁴ reinforcing that the wry humor was purposeful and necessary. The film was pieced together under traumatic circumstances, and this sometimes comedic overwrought-ness is central to its ethos. The Crow is all about a romantic and melancholic pain like an exposed nerve, which the film prods and pokes with the same macabre curiosity that prompts us to press on a tender bruise and can also make us laugh in discomfort or dismay.

In The Crow, there is a pain that is too much; it throbs and glistens with lifeblood, even in and around so much death, appearing on characters in ways that rail against logic’s expectations. The curious thing is that, although this heavy darkness is easy to slip into when sad, it’s not an easy watch precisely for this heft. The film’s pain ricochets through me during every one of my rewatches, reawakening and corralling to the surface all my own fanged memories, which can be, in a sort of paradox, a celebration of life. Pain is messy, emotions are gooey, and they bleed into one another. But ultimately, and most importantly, tears, fear, laughter, and grief are signs that we are alive, a truth that The Crow is a brave and relentless reminder of.

1 “The Crow,” IMDb, accessed May 3, 2024,

2 Roger Ebert, “Reviews: The Crow,” movie review and film summary, RogerEbert.com, May 13, 1994,

3 “The Crow,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed May 3, 2024,

4 “Behind the Scenes «The Crow» (1994),” YouTube, January 27, 2017,

Excerpted in part from It Can’t Rain All the Time  by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com