Julia Küster was topless briefly in Sentimental Value (2025)

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Outstanding film.

This Norwegian drama about family relationships got a long standing ovation at Cannes, and was nominated for nine Oscars. It won the Grand Prize at Cannes, and the Oscar for the Best International Feature Film, as well as the corresponding BAFTA.

IMDb: 7.8
Tomato Meter: 95%
Popcorn Meter: 94%

After the death of their mother, sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged, once-famous director father. He tries to revive his career with a personal film project. When Nora, a professional actress, refuses a role, it leads to confrontations about art, legacy, and family trauma, in this humorous and heartbreaking film.

The writer/director, Joachim Trier, is obviously our kind of guy. In addition to creating a brilliant movie, he inserted a brief breast shot that is completely unnecessary. It’s more than “unnecessary.” I still haven’t figured out why it’s there at all. It’s an outdoor scene, about two seconds in duration, that’s kind of stuck into the middle of a dark indoor scene. My best guess is that it was to be part of a different sequence that was abandoned in the final cut, but the director decided to make use of it as a “flash of memory” in the narration. I assume that’s also why it is slightly blurry, like a memory. The film has many themes and one of them is our connection to our past through memories.

Although the topless scene is about two seconds long, I made a 20-second clip to demonstrate how awkwardly the outdoor scene fit into the surrounding action.


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They did quite an amazing job of de-aging Stellan Skarsgård in the flashbacks. A couple of scenes may have been created from old footage of him, but there are other scenes that were obviously performed by old Stellan and de-aged with AI. It looks exactly the way he used to look.

Trivia:

So there is a popular, long-running podcast, for those who don’t know of it, called “How Did This Get Made?” where Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas and sometimes guests comedically discuss “bad” or bad movies.

One of their classic episodes is for “Deep Blue Sea,” the movie where scientists experiment on sharks by injecting some kind of heightened protein into their brains, searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s. It blows up in their faces. Stellan Skarsgard plays one of the scientists.

In the podcast, they mention that auto-correct changes Stellan’s name to “Stellar Skateboard.” People have gone into Stellan’s Wikipedia page so often to change his name to “Stellar Skateboard” that Wikipedia has locked his page to updates.