The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023). Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut feature is thunderously brutal, as all films set on frontier spaces at the close of the nineteenth century should be. Taken place in Chile, the film depicts a trek across the barely tamed portions of the country with the aim of expansive European colonialism. MacLennan (Mark Stanley) snarlingly leads a small band of travelers that also includes an American mercenary (Benjamin Westfall) and a Chilean tracker (Camilo Arancibia). The mutual resentment of all involved pulses as the drama’s heartbeat. Gálvez Haberle is unflinching in showing the seething inhumanity of the foreign interlopers to the land, and he makes strong points about the built-in cruelty of militaristic and capitalistic systems. The Settlers looks great, benefiting from beautiful cinematography by Simone D’Arcangelo. Even so, the relentless bleakness turns the film into a grind before it’s over. Compounding the endurance test of watching, just about every performance would benefit from scaling back the intensity ten to twenty percent.

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024). Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is an aimless young man who returns to his provincial hometown for the funeral of a formal boss. After the rituals are complete, Jérémie accepts an offer from the deceased’s widow (Catherine Frot) to stay with her for a few days. Her son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), sees Jérémie as a schemer taking advantage of a bereft old lady, and the animosity between the two escalates to dangerous levels. Writer-director Alain Guiraudie adapted the film from his own 2021 novel, and he presents the material like a stately, erudite neo-noir. Even the kinkier moments have an air of refinement, which feels very French. Cinematographer Claire Mathon, a previous collaborator of Guiraudie’s who’s also done amazing work with director Céline Sciamma, gives the visuals a ravishing, painterly feel. The plotting occasionally takes too much liberty with basic plausibility, notably with a nearly omnipresent priest (Jacques Develay).

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025). Director Joachim Trier’s study of a family is heartfelt, elegantly made, emotionally astute, and just plain great. Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are sisters who operate at different degrees of distance with their movie director father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). After the death of his ex-wife, who was also Nora and Agnes’s mother, Gustav comes back into his daughters’ lives. Simultaneously, he’s trying to mount a film project that he sees as a comeback vehicle. He wants Nora, an acclaimed stage actress in Oslo, to take the lead in the film, but she refuses, leading him to instead enlist an American starlet (Elle Fanning). Trier wrote the script with his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt, and he careful guides the characters through waves of complicated feeling. The film is especially strong at showing how trauma echoes across generations. Trier has a real command of overt technique, and he employs that artfully here. All of the performances are wonderful. It might be the best work Skarsgård has ever done, but Reinsve is the true standout. Nora is a bundle of raw, conflicting feelings, and she’s adept at drawing on that inner turmoil like fuel. Reinsve somehow plays all that complicated, controlled messiness while maintaining a steady subtlety. It’s remarkable acting.