Dogville

Premiere Glenn Kenny

It really is a masterpiece--von Trier's first, as it happens.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Von Trier sets the action on a theatrical stage, spotlighting the existential isolation that weighs on people who don't seek larger visions of life, individuality, and community. Challenging, dramatic, provocative.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Mischievous, singular and profound.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Intentionally designed to rile as much as entertain.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

This unique cinematic experience is a parable of greed and revenge that could take place anywhere.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

No matter how you come down on this movie politically, Dogville is a compelling chamber piece with constant cinematic surprises. And you remember that von Trier is, above everything else, a consummate filmmaker.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

A stunning display of a filmmaker adventuring on the far side of what's possible.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Kidman gives the most emotionally bruising performance of her career in Dogville, a movie that never met a cliche it didn't stomp on.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

The incendiary Dogville confirms the director's sadistic knack for locating his characters' (and his audience's) soft spots and prodding them for a singular emotional experience.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

A postmodern morality play stripped nearly bare by its precocious creator, until only its boldness, cutting insight, intermittent hilarity and bracing violence remain.

Empire Alan Morrison

Argue that von Trier’s latest is theatre and not cinema. But at least acknowledge that Dogville, in a didactic and politicised stage tradition, is a great play that shows a deep understanding of human beings as they really are.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Not for everyone. It is darkly funny, intellectually challenging and obliquely didactic. It also grows bleaker over the course of its nearly three-hour running time.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Dogville isn't for everyone, but there's some intellectually stimulating conversation fodder for those with the patience to navigate the film's rough terrain.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

May be the most fascinating, richly accomplished screw-up you'll see all year. Von Trier, who has always had a talent for provocation, nails another heroine to the cross while playing his role to the hilt - a moviemaking rebel in his own dog days.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Surprises, repulses and provokes. It's also brilliant and infuriating, wise and naïve, outrageous yet unforgettable.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Only the heavy stylization mitigates some highly artificial plot contrivances, and the final photo montage of America's poor, while no doubt exciting to Von Trier the provocateur, is maddeningly oblique.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Von Trier’s vision is amazingly thorough and exquisitely executed, but the audience may feel executed as well.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Lars von Trier exhibits the imagination of an artist and the pedantry of a crank in Dogville, a film that works as a demonstration of how a good idea can go wrong.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

The film centers almost entirely on the faces of the townspeople, which Von Trier frames vividly. There’s nothing static about his technique, but everything else about the movie is dreary and closed off.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

Newsweek David Ansen

Von Trier, however, undercuts the universality of his own message with his meretricious closing credits, set to David Bowie's "Young Americans," which explicitly turns Dogville into an anti-American screed.

Variety Todd McCarthy

An artistically experimental, ideologically apocalyptic blast at American values that is as obvious in intent as it is murky in aesthetic achievement.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

A provocation, a coup de théâtre and three hours of tedious experimentation.

Film Threat Phil Hall

If Dogville has a reason for importance, it is the astonishing all-star ensemble who try very hard to put life into their cardboard characters and make this silly film work.

Time Richard Corliss

It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Bored me for most of its 178 minutes and then infuriated me with its cheap cynicism once it belatedly became interesting--which may be a tribute to writer-director Lars von Trier's gifts as a provocateur.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Lars von Trier's latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically thrilling. But it isn't.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

But as an artist, von Trier's contempt for humanity is becoming harder to hide with stylistic flourish. He doesn't even try here, and his arrogance is topped only by his misanthropy.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Disembodied, patchy, pointless work, which isn't even successfully pretentious.

Slate David Edelstein

The politics of Dogville are on par with a third-rate gangster picture: cheap, opportunistic nihilism, with no enlivening sense of humor.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A symphony for tin ears, a sniggering assessment of human nature delivered with the faux-lofty tone of a Lexus commercial.

The New Yorker David Denby

What Lars von Trier has achieved is avant-gardism for idiots. From beginning to end, Dogville is obtuse and dislikable, a whimsical joke wearing cement shoes. [29 March 2004, p. 103]