Sentimental Value ranks among the best films I’ve seen about fractured families, intergenerational trauma, and healing through art—and I’ve seen a lot of them. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel or do anything groundbreaking. In fact, the story is relatively predictable, but it’s executed with such masterful emotional precision and sincerity that it feels revelatory.

Perhaps the most common critique of Nicolas Winding Refn’s divisive film The Neon Demon is the claim that the film is “all style, no substance.” However, this argument is exactly the point that Refn is trying to make. The film focuses on the theme of vanity and condemns society’s hollow obsession with physical beauty. The way in which the film critiques this idea is by acting as an allegory.