Joachim Trier's complex family drama

 On the surface, Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value seems poised to tell a conventional family story. That might have happened had Trier not placed his characters against a backdrop that includes theater, film, and acting, a choice that deepens questions his film raises about the complicated nature of father/daughter relationships.

   Stellan Skarsgard brings a weary yet calculating quality to the role of Gustav Borg, a filmmaker trying to make one last great movie, a swan song he hopes will confirm his fading stature and solidify his legacy. He's the father of two daughters with whom he has become estranged.

   As Gustav's daughter, Nora, Renate Reinsve, who starred in Trier's The Worst Person in the World, plays an actress who could make Gustav's film soar. Unfortunately for him, she harbors too many resentments (many justifiable) to accept an offer to play the movie's lead.

   In the movie's third key performance, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Nora's sister Agnes. Less embittered, Agnes has more tolerance for a father who basically abandoned his family and has only now returned to attend the funeral of his former wife.

   Gustav's reappearance may not be motivated by grief or sentiment. Due to a legal technicality, he owns the home in which his late wife raised his daughters. It's also where he plans to shoot his film.

   Temperamental and deeply neurotic, Nora is introduced in an alarming way. She's playing the main character in a reimagined version of a Chekhov play but finds excuse after excuse not to go on stage when cued. 

   Perhaps in an attempt to manipulate his reluctant daughter, Gustav casts Elle Fanning's Rachel Kemp, an American actress  to star in his film. She's bankable, but we get the feeling Gustav knows her casting is a mistake. 

  Reticent to the point of cruelty, Gustav offers little support as Kemp struggles to find her way into the role. Numerous rehearsal scenes highlight Kemp's inability to connect to the role she's been offered; but Fanning makes it clear that the talented, committed actress baldy needs guidance that Gustav refuses to supply. 

   And on another level, Gustav knows he's asking too much of Kemp. An alcoholic, he's capable of spewing drink-fueled sarcasm, but he's not mean enough to humiliate an actress who's trying.

   Gustav's film -- his first in 15 years -- isn't his first attempt to direct one of his daughters. He directed Lilleaas as a child in the movie that made him famous. She expressed no further interest in acting. He focused on her during the filming, but then deserted the family.

    To further complicate matters, Agnes is married with a child that Gustav relates to with affection he seldom showed his daughters. 

    Tender scenes between the sisters enrich the emotional environment, and Trier adds a historical dimension to the proceedings. Gustav grew in the home he now owns and where his mother was snatched by the Nazis, who tortured her during the War.  Gustav wants to tell his mother's story, although he insists that his film is not autobiographical. 

   It's clear from the outset that Gustav wants to reconcile with Nora. Perhaps the only way he knows how to do that is to direct her while letting her talent blossom, to give her a splendid showcase. Still, his attempt also reflects the self-absorption of an artist who's thinking about what's best for his movie.

    Sentimental Value has its comic moments but Trier, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Eskil Vogt, has made a rewarding dramatic work, one that allows gifted actors to create characters of uncommon complexity.

'Dune: Part II': a stunning epic

 

 Huge in scale, long in the telling (166 minutes). and sporting arcane references from author Frank Herbert's landmark 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune: Part II has arrived. Don’t fret. Director Denis Villeneuve, who released Part One in 2023, delivers a movie with enough visionary heft and action to justify its epic scope.

  I thought Villeneuve's initial effort represented a marked improvement over David Lynch's 1984 sci-fi foray into Duneland, making the most of a drama steeped in intrigue and boasting enough bizarre-looking characters to sustain several otherworldly parade floats.

   More action-oriented than Part One and benefiting from cinematographer Grieg Fraser's stunning desert imagery, Part Two tells a story even non-fans should be able to follow as opposing planets in a vast galactic empire vie for control of melange, a rare spice that serves as an emblem of power.

   In this edition, we spend more time with the Fremen, desert dwellers of Arrakis, the planet where spice is mined and refined and where the heartless Harkonnen have become an occupying force.

    Much of the movie involves efforts by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) to earn a place among the Fremen. Paul wants to join their fight against the Harkonnen, led by the blubberous Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard).

   Eventually, the Baron unleashes his nephew Feyd-Rautha, a sneering, sadistic villain brought to frighteningly sharp life by Austin Butler.

    Villeneuve keeps a large supporting cast from swamping the various throughlines. A dust-covered Javier Bardem adds humor to his portrayal of Fremen leader Stilgar. Dave Bautista brings bulky menace to the role of Beast Rabban, another Harkonnen sadist, and a subdued Christopher Walken turns up as the emperor who presides over a vast planetary imperium. Josh Brolin returns as Paul's one-time mentor.

    With all that out of the way, let's get to the heart of the movie, provided by Chalomet and Zendaya, who plays the Fremen warrior Chani, a young woman dedicated to ridding the Fremen of oppressive colonial rule. 

     Paul, who earns the Fremen name Usul, and Chani fall in love, allowing the movie to raise questions about Paul’s loyalties. Is he for Fremen freedom or will he use their belief in him to augment his power? Can the aristocratic Paul be trusted by the justifiably suspicious masses?

    Much is made about whether Paul might be the messiah some of  the more fervent Fremen have been awaiting, allowing the movie to touch on additional issues concerning the dangerous ways religious and political aspiration can corrupt each other.

    The stakes may be starkly drawn, but characters are nicely shaded. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Paul's mother, encouraging his ambitious side and sometimes finding herself at odds with her son.

     Part Two thrives on scale, booming set-pieces (a gladiatorial battle with, alas, a crowd that looks CIG-generated), and the summoning of giant sandworms that live beneath the surface of Arrakis and are the source of melange, the spice with near-miraculous powers.

       For all its intricacies, betrayals, and plotting, the story retains its thematic resonance. What moral prices must be paid to control the spice.

      Now, after almost six hours of movie, Dune isn't finished. Questions remain for Paul, Chani, and the entire empire. Expect Part Three. I find that a bit dispiriting. If a story can't be told in six hours, maybe it's a miniseries.

      But the world of Dune remains intriguingly complex, full of characters whose roles shift and evolve. Credit Villeneuve with filling the screen with enough exotic flavor and bold action to keep Dune vividly alive through two helpings. 

      There's no reason to think he couldn't do the same in a third.

Sand and sci-fi in other-worldly ‘Dune’

     Here's the essence of what needs to be said about director Denis Villeneuve's long-awaited adaptation of Dune, the 1965 Frank Herbert novel that has acquired classic status among    many sci-fi enthusiasts.   

   Far more comprehensible than David Lynch's 1984 version, as well as more visually expansive and better acted, Villeneuve's Dune seems designed to please the novel's legion of fans. If it does, that's no small achievement.

    Beyond that, the movie shouldn't overly confound those who know nothing of the Dune universe. It also stands as a worthy testament to what the visual imagination can achieve when trying to bring a complex work of fiction to the screen.

   Herbert's lengthy novel may have made a better mini-series than a feature, but Villeneuve's version (actually only half of the story) benefits from being seen on the largest screen possible in a theater with a sound system geared to rattling brains inside pop-corn munching skulls.

   Villeneuve successfully creates a fantasy world in which vehicles resembling helicopters flutter multiple sets of wings and vast expanses of a desert planet stretch endlessly toward the  horizon. It's possible that Dune makes the most expressive use of sand in any movie since Lawrence of Arabia.

  Still a word of caution: There's something inherently frustrating about a two-hour and 35-minute movie that ends by telling us we've just witnessed "the beginning."

   The thing that separates Dune from other sci-fi ventures is it's pervasive strangeness, an otherworldly quality reflected in the movie’s costume design and in the names of its characters. 

   Young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) may be the longed-for Kwisatz Haderach. (Don’t ask).

   Paul's mother  Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) is the concubine of Paul's father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and a member of the Bene Gesserit, women with special powers.

   Stellan Skarsgård appears as the obscenely bloated Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the story's villain.

   I'll torture you with no more of these names. I mention them because they suggest that Dune is more than a hunk of sci-fi with rich ecological and anti-mechanistic ambitions. A distinctive cult flavor evokes comparisons with works such as Lord of the Rings, at least in the impact Dune has had on devotees. 

  Two additional characters register in the movie's sea of eccentricity. Jason Momoa plays Duncan Idaho, an engagingly robust warrior on whom Paul has a man crush. Josh Brolin portrays Gurney Halleck, Paul's combat instructor. Each adds manly heft.

   The plot amounts to a mash-up of mythologies, the most notable involving expectations that a messiah figure will provide some form of salvation. 

    Early on, the House of Atreides — one of many — has been assigned custodianship of the planet Arrakis. Arrakis, we learn, is the source of the spice melange, essential to interplanetary travel, longevity and more.

  Previously, the planet was ruled by the Harkonnen, foul warriors who exploited Arrakis and its native population, the Fremens. A fierce desert-like people who know how to live with the planet's terrifyingly enormous sand worms, the Fremens add Middle Eastern flavor.

   Of course, it doesn’t take long for us to understand that the House of Atreides is under grave threat. Perhaps the woman Paul dreams of -- the Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) — will help save the day if Villeneuve gets to make the rest of the story. 

    Villeneuve's epic left me looking forward to more and eager to learn how much sway Dune still holds in the pop-cultural imagination. I know people, now quite grown, for whom Dune was a formative read of youth.

     That wouldn't be me. Perhaps that's why I watched Villeneuve's richly realized world with appreciation, even if I sometimes felt more like an impressed tourist than someone who had fully invested in this sci-fi saga.

 

A war-time ordeal brought to the screen

     A few minutes into Czech director Vaclav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird you may think you have fallen back into the 1970s and 1980s, a time when Eastern European cinema indulged itself in stark black-and-white imagery while dipping into bowlfuls of philosophical gloom. 

     Actually, The Painted Bird is a belated adaptation of         Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel, a book initially hailed as a harrowing semi-autobiographical account of Kosinski’s war-time experiences as a child and later thought to be more a work of the author's febrile imagination.

     On film, the imagery by cinematographer Vladimir Smutny practically begs to be seen as masterpiece-level work, calling attention to its dark beauty and substantial compositional virtues. And at nearly three hours in length, The Painted Bird proves a movie with a divided soul, part horrifying war-time drama and part endurance test.

     The story involves a boy (Petr Kotlar) whose father deposits him with a neighbor when the war begins, hoping to keep the boy from perishing in German death camps. It’s clear that the boy — unnamed until nearly the movie’s end — is Jewish but Marhoul treats him as a kind of generic outsider during cascading episodes of murder, rape, torment, and even bestiality. Marhoul tells his story in segments, each titled for a character the boy encounters.

     You know you’re in for a rough ride when, early on, the boy is beaten by his anti-Semitic peers, and taken in by an aging woman named Marta (Nina Sunevic) whom he eventually discovers sitting dead in her chair.

     As the boy forges on, he encounters one horror after another.  A miller (Udo Kier) becomes insanely violent, plucking out the eyes of a man he suspects of sleeping with his wife.  
    Another character (Lech Dyblik) explains the movie’s title. With the boy watching, he paints a small bird’s wings white and then releases it. Quickly, the bird is torn apart by a flock of blackbirds, an inescapable metaphor for the savagery of bigotry that has engulfed the world.

     A seemingly kindly priest (Harvey Keitel) tries to help the boy but places him with a parishioner who sexually abuses the boy and torments him in other ways. 

     When he lands with a young woman (Julia Valentova), we initially believe that the boy finally may have found someone who will treat him kindly. No way. Among other things, the woman turns out to be so lust-ridden she has sex with goats.

     The movie’s international cast also includes Stellan Skarsgard as a German soldier who helps the boy escape. Barry Pepper turns up as a Russian soldier who takes the boy underwing.

     Although the story takes place during World War II, the boy’s encounters with Eastern European peasants seem reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a world of misery and thatched-roof hovels.

    Marhoul infuses the movie with an abundance of brutality as he vivifies the hellish impact of war and deprivation on people whose lives already were mean and insufficient.

    The Painted Bird deserves credit for diving into such deeply disturbing waters, but the line between artistry and ordeal becomes so fuzzy here that by the time the movie concluded, I no longer could distinguish between the two.

A revenge film and a bold British musical

DON'T MESS WITH THIS SNOW PLOW DRIVER

The Norwegian movie, In Order of Disappearance, has a regrettably familiar undertow, perhaps a result of the pervasive influence of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. Following a schematic structure in which various sections are introduced with titles, director Hans Petter Moland takes us through a series of revenge killings carried out by a snow plow driver (Stellan Skarsgard). The driver's son, we quickly learn, was mistakenly killed in a drug-related crossfire. Skarsgard has the chops to make us believe that an apparently ordinary man has the grit to carry out such a relentless mission. A character called The Count (Pal Sverre Hagen) becomes the most colorful villain in the piece, a brutal fellow who's constantly being frustrated by mundane problems, arguments with his former wife (Brigitte Hjorth Sorensen) and concerns about getting his kid to school on time. With a movie such as this, much of the kick stems from how Skarsgard's Nils dispatches his prey, but additional complications ensue: Rather than focusing on Nils, the unsuspecting Count decides that a rival Serbian gang must be muscling in on his territory. A weary looking Bruno Ganz portrays an aggrieved Serbian gang boss who's also trying to avenge the death of a son. A desolate snowbound setting gives the entire enterprise frosted chill, and the movie manages to hold our interest despite its somewhat derivative feel. Credit veterans Skarsgard and Ganz for giving In Order of Disappearance weight it otherwise might have lacked.

AN ENGLISH MUSICAL BASED ON SERIAL KILLINGS

Forget the photo that accompanies this short review. The British actor Tom Hardy appears in only one scene in London Road, a musical based on a series of 2006 killings that terrorized Ipswich, a town in Suffolk, England. A forklift operator named Steven Wright (never seen in the movie) was convicted of murdering five prostitutes during a six-week period that attracted tabloid interest and set the Ipswich townsfolk on edge. Rather than follow a thriller path, the screenplay by Alecky Blythe explores the impact of the killings on the town -- both before and after the killer is apprehended. It's hardly surprising that the townsfolk begin to regard one another with suspicion or that some of their judgmental attitudes about prostitution are put on display. First produced as a play, London Road makes a reasonably good transition to the screen under the guidance of director Rufus Norris. Composer Adam Cook's urgent score fits the movie's fleet 91-minute length. London Road is further distinguished by the fact that much of the dialogue (including moments in which actors speak directly to the camera) derives from real interviews with Ipswich residents. In sum, not quite the groundbreaker it must have felt like on a London stage, but still worth a look.

Spies in a world shorn of honor

Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard enrich Our Kind of Traitor, an engaging adaptation of a John le Carre thriller.

Almost any John le Carre novel has the potential to yield an intelligent, big-screen thriller. Adapted from a 2010 le Carre novel, Our Kind of Traitor proves the point, deftly luring us into a world populated by Russian mobsters, British academics, and British intelligence agents, all of them operating against backdrops that extend from Marrakech to Paris.

Perfectly timed to compete with the bloated drivel of summer, Our Kind of Traitor reminded me of the kind of movie pleasures I'd lately been missing, namely characters who find themselves in situations they couldn't possibly have anticipated and which prove morally taxing.

Early on, we meet Perry (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomi Harris), a couple vacationing in Marrakech in hopes of reviving a sagging marriage. Self-sufficient professionals, Perry and Gail are dining in a restaurant when Gail abruptly leaves to handle a business matter.

Left alone, Perry is approached by a convivial Russian (Stellan Skarsgard) who invites him to have a drink with his companions, a surly looking bunch. Perry reluctantly accepts, and soon finds himself accompanying Skarsgard's Dima to a party full of temptations, mostly in the form of drugs and women.

Because Dima belongs to the Russian mafia, these temptations come with obvious forebodings: Perry's crude, tattooed associates make no attempt to conceal their carnal appetites.

Full of robust charm and confidence, Dima assures Perry that he needn't be alarmed. He calls him "professor." He overpowers Perry's resistance with loudly expressed charm.

Of course, Dima has an ulterior motive. He wants Perry to transport a memory stick to London. As the man who launders Russian mob money, Dima says he'll name prominent Brits who are in cahoots with Russian crime czars. In return, he wants asylum for himself and his family.

The rest needn't be revealed here, but director Susanna White and screenwriter Hossein Amini treat le Carre's work kindly in a story that focuses on characters who are trying to get out of predicaments rather than penetrate secret inner sanctums.

Once Perry agrees to transport the memory stick, he's in over his head. A British operative (Damian Lewis) pushes Perry to become even more involved, arguing that he holds the key to saving Dima and his family.

Of course, betrayals and bureaucratic fumbles abound, as well as subterranean motivations in which money trumps anything resembling patriotism or honor.

In Dima, Our Kind of Traitor finds a terrific character. Entirely engaging, ebullient and tough, Dima makes no bones about having dirty hands. Yet, we understand Perry's fascination with him. Dina suggests something bigger and more life-affirming than his circumstances might have us believe, a deep understanding of the world's ways. He also knows how to use truth as weapon.

But it's not only plot and performance -- McGregor's best in a while -- that makes Our Kind of Traitor so intriguing; it's the movie's knowledge, acquired from le Carre, that the rot of barbarism can be found beneath the civilized veneer of societies that run on murderous greed. That attitude carries us past the movie's improbabilities and coincidences -- if not to greatness then at least to sustained interest.

In le Carre's fallen world, as made clear in the movie's gripping opening, there's always a chance that the purity of a snow-covered field will be stained with the blood of a beautiful innocent.

'The Railway Man': off and on track

A compelling story told with sporadic effectiveness.

A young but resourceful British soldier during World War II, Eric Lomax became a prisoner of war, part of the legion of British captives and Asian workers forced to toil on construction of the Thailand to Burma railroad.

The Railway Man -- a movie about Lomax's experiences -- is at its most effective when depicting the brutalizing torture Lomax experienced at the hands of the Japanese after he was caught with a radio and a map.

The Japanese insisted Lomax was trying to communicate with China. In reality, he and his imprisoned pals were listening to war news on a radio that couldn't transmit. Lomax, a long-time train enthusiast, used the map to chart the course of the line.

Colin Firth plays Lomax as a man suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, a veteran whose experiences -- which included water-boarding -- keep him from fully engaging in his marriage to a Canadian woman (Nicole Kidman). Lomax and Kidman's Patti met in 1980 -- on a train, of course.

Director Jonathan Tiplitzky complicates the story by lacing it with flashbacks -- some springing from Lomax's tormented psyche and some from a recounting of events by one of Lomax's war-time pals, a miscast Stellan Skarsgard.

Kidman's Patti pushes Lomax to share experiences he's kept bottled up since the end of the war. Kidman gives the expected fine performance, but her presence in the film proves a little tangential.

Jeremy Irvine effectively plays the younger Lomax in flashbacks to the war.

Eventually, the post-war Lomax returns to the scene of the Japanese war crimes he endured. He fully expects to kill one of his surviving torturers (Hiroyuki Sanada), a man who's now earning a living conducting what Skarsgard's character refers to as "Bridge on the River Kwai tourism."

The big issue -- no less powerful for being obvious -- involves the conflict between Lomax's understandable desire for revenge and his need for reconciliation.

The big confrontation scene between the British veteran and his Japanese tormenter almost shrinks the movie into a play on film, but Sanada and Firth make it powerful nonetheless.

Nymphomanic: Volume II, the punishment

Lars Von Trier continues the torment.

Not content with one sexually explicit movie, Danish director Lars von Trier has issued the provocatively titled Nymphomaniac in two volumes.

Volume 1 dealt with a nymphomaniacal woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who told her story to an older man (Stellan Skarsgard) who adopted an Olympian view of her sexual history.

Seen in flashbacks, the young Joe (played by Stacy Martin) learned to express her power through sex, a risky business to be sure.

Together both volumes total more than four hours, making Nymphomaniac a contender for the longest sex movie yet -- if, indeed, it's really about sex.

In Volume II, the adult Joe takes over the story, and von Trier more clearly marks his territory by pushing her toward punishing extremes.

What happens? Joe -- who has lost all sexual sensation -- submits to torment from a sadist (Jamie Bell) who ties her down and beats her up. In the process, Joe proves that she's a careless mom and renounces those who would judge her at a meeting of sex addicts.

She also sleeps with two black men who face each other naked in what looks like a duel of semi-erect penises.

Toward the end, Joe hooks up with an extortionist (Willem DaFoe) and acquires a wily protege (Mia Goth).

All this is recounted in flashbacks as Joe finishes telling Skarsgard's Seligman how she wound up bloodied in an alley, which is how he discovered her at the beginning of Volume I.

In Volume I, Von Trier punished some of the characters: He does so again, but this time, the torment extends to the audience.

The shock of explicitly presented sex having been depleted in the first volume, we're left to watch Gainsbourg's Joe demean herself, take a prideful stance toward her activities and ultimately commit one final act of self-assertion.

Whatever von Trier had to say seems to have been said in the first movie. Volume II doesn't add much, except for those who want to speculate about von Trier's aims with yet another movie that seems designed to provoke without explanation.

As for what motivates Joe: It may be nothing more than von Trier's desire to put her through a variety of degrading situations and then try to defend himself by glossing it all with a feminist veneer.

As my grandmother might have said, "Oy."

Lars Von Trier's sexual odyssey

Part I of a two-part film prompts a mixed reaction.

An older man discovers a woman lying in an alley. She's been badly beaten. He takes her home, puts her in his bed and begins nursing her back to some semblance of health and stability. She, in turn, tells him her story.

The set-up is nothing if not conventional, but when you know that I'm describing the opening of director Lars Van Trier's Nymphomaniac: Volume I, you'll understand that the movie has no intention of following a familiar arc.

As best as can be gleaned from Volume I -- reviewers have not yet had access to Volume II -- Von Trier has decided to explore female sexuality by pushing one woman's story to nymphomaniacal extremes.

We soon learn that Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the bruised woman from the alley, has taken an aggressively pro-active approach to sex, taking up with what seems a never-ending stream of men. Joe's relationships are brought to us in a variety of flashbacks in which Stacy Martin plays Joe as a young woman.

This being Volume I, we're left to surmise what might have brought Joe to her moment of degradation in that damp back alley.

The screenplay makes Joe her harshest critic; her rescuer (Stellan Skarsgard) seems a man of infinite patience. He steadfastly refuses to judge Joe. Instead, he gives her quasi-philosophical pep talks as they sit around his monkishly spare apartment.

Skarsgard's Seligman rambles on about fishing and other matters. He loves Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, and tries to connect fly fishing to Joe's story.

This gives Von Trier an opportunity to create some beautiful fishing and stream imagery, which adds a sense of mystery, but doesn't exactly prove revelatory in terms of our understanding.

Principal among Joe's relationships is her intermittent connection with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). As a girl, Joe asks Jerome to take her virginity. He obliges. She then runs into him at various times during the story.

Some of the movie has a near-comical tone. At one point, Joe and a girlfriend take a train ride. They compete over who can score the most conquests on the train.

Given her rampant sexual activities, it's hardly surprising that Joe becomes something of an expert on penises. Perhaps that's why Von Trier includes a series of shots of penises of varying types and description.

Is he suggesting that, for Joe, men have been reduced to this essential bit of equipment? Is he mocking male genitalia by calling attention to their strangeness when abstracted from the rest of the body?

We also learn about Joe's upbringing as the movie progresses. She tells us her mother was emotionally frigid. Her father (Christian Slater) seems to have been an understanding fellow who introduced his daughter to the wonders of nature. Von Trier punishes his apparent decency with a cruel death scene.

Von Trier also makes room for an appearance by Uma Thurman, who plays the wife of a misguided husband who believes that Joe's in love with him. Thurman's character arrives at Joe's apartment moments after her fleeing husband, who thinks he's about to move in.

To make matters even more bizarre, Thurman's character -- named in the credits as Mrs. H -- brings her two sons on her journey of revenge. How else to complete the humiliation of this poor sap, a man who apparently has misread everything about Joe?

Did Volume I leave me as eager for Volume II as I was for the next episode of Breaking Bad? Hardly. I'll certainly watch Part II, but I can't say I'd feel deprived if I didn't.

The movie's provocative title, its occasional obtuseness and its artful visual gestures may well create a mixed reaction for those who aren't entirely put off by the excessive nudity, sex and blunt language.

For me, though, the most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, Volume I is that I didn't have a stronger reaction to it. Perhaps Volume II will light a stronger fire.

Von Trier hears the sweet call of doom

The provocative Danish director outdoes himself with a gloom-shrouded epic of annihilation.

Anyone familiar with the work of Danish director Lars von Trier knows he specializes in movies so bleak they hardly allow for even the slightest expression of faith in humanity.

After 1996's Breaking the Waves , von Trier became a regular on the festival circuit, sometimes connecting (Dogville) and sometimes missing the mark (Antichrist). Those, of course, are my assessments. Von Trier enthusiasts will have their own favorites, and nothing he does ever will please his many detractors.

Last May, von Trier may have bitten the festival hand that feeds him. He was barred from the Cannes Film Festival after making ridiculous comments about Hitler, Naziism and Albert Speer. He was attempting, I think, to position himself in the land of outrageous opinion. He also seemed to be making a joke, the humor of which eluded just about everyone who heard him. Von Trier clearly would be better off letting his movies speak for him.

And in his latest movie -- Melancholia -- the director speaks loudly and with no small amount of pomp, delivering a message steeped in romanticized doom. No slouch when it comes to pessimism, von Trier imagines not only the destruction of individual characters, but of the entire planet. He seems to think that this might not be such a bad thing. After all, life -- with its pointless rituals and stupid striving -- doesn't amount to much anyway.

Melancholia uses a kind of sci-fi backdrop to enlarge the scale of its inquiries. A planet 12 times the size of Earth is heading directly for our tiny planet. If this approaching planet -- bearing the metaphoric name Melancholia -- doesn't change course, it's a total wipeout for Earth and its creatures.

The opening of Melancholia boasts some of the most astonishing images of the year, sights on a par with the great work that Terrence Malick did in the cosmic segments of Tree of Life. Most of the von Trier's best imagery occurs in this prologue, a series of images that summarize the entire movie in graceful slow-motion, all to the strains of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

In the first half of Melancholia, von Trier takes us to the wedding of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The couple becomes late for their very elegant reception when their limo gets stuck in the forest. Watching a massive white limo trying to negotiate a tiny wooded road clues us to von Trier's comic sense of absurdity. What could be sillier than celebrating a new beginning as the cosmic wrecking ball approaches? Like the limo on that impossible road, it's a bad fit.

As is often the case, the director offers some stiff competition for the all-too-familiar irritations of his hand-held camera. The bride's mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes sneering comments about the futility of marriage. She's divorced from Justine's father (John Hurt), who drinks too much and seems to wallow in warm sentimentality. The bride's boss (Stellan Skarsgard) proves to be an obnoxious ad man who insists that Justine invent an advertising slogan before the reception concludes.

Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) bravely tries to keep things going while her husband (Kiefer Sutherland), the sap who's paying for the nuptials, complains about the bride's irresponsibility. In conventional terms, he's absolutely right: At one point, the bride abandons the groom to make love to a stranger on the golf course surrounding the lavish estate where the wedding reception is being held.

That’s pretty much the pattern. The reception – punctuated by all manner of small social hostilities – takes place under the shadow of the irresistible doom to which Justine finds herself drawn. Justine has fallen under the spell of melancholia (with a small "m"). Try as she may, she can't make herself conform to what she probably sees as the frivolous demands of the wedding. (I guess she didn't trust her doomy instincts enough to forgo the whole thing in the first place.)

Dunst keeps the audience off guard as a deeply disturbed woman who's obviously suffering from powerful inner turmoil. Dunst gives one of those courageous, all-out performances that looks as if it probably left her spent.

Part II -- named for Claire -- involves the opposing ways in which the two sisters -- Justine and Claire -- cope with what they think will be the end of the world. Having had her erotic flirtation with death, Justine seems increasingly ready to consummate the affair. Beset by fear, anxiety and concern for her young son, Claire resists.

For his part, Sutherland's John attempts to reassure his wife and young son (Cameron Spurr) that the approach of the planet should be regarded as a scientific adventure, not a portend of doom. In a von Trier movie, he's a walking demonstration of the failure of rationality.

Unfortunately, the movie's second half slows down considerably. By the time von Trier's apocalyptic denouement arrives -- and I found myself rooting for it -- you'll either have yielded to Melancholia or you'll have headed for the exits. I was alternately entranced, bored and dubious.

It falls to Justine to sound what could be von Trier's motto: "All I know is life on earth is evil." I don't think even the obnoxious behavior of the wedding guests justifies such a sweeping conclusion, but von Trier never has been one for cinematic restraint, and his final images are as compelling as those that opened the movie.

I can't give this one a clear yes or no. If nothing about Melancholia sounds alluring, stay home. I wouldn't think of arguing you out of your easy chair. Otherwise, cue the Wagner, try to keep from smirking at the movie's more ridiculous parts, and, by all means, let the apocalypse rip.