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100One of the most searing experiences to be had at the movies this year.
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100A thrilling, audacious work.
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90For all its fancy pedigree, the spellbinding Dancer in the Dark aims right for the heart and aces its target.
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89Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.
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88It is a bold, reckless gesture.
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88(The film is) one of the most anguished, intense and weirdly brilliant of the year.
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88A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.
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88Can be unbearably moving or annoyingly mawkish, sometimes in the same scene.
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80I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.
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80This is a film like no other this year, and on that grounds alone you should see it.
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80Bjork gives what may be the most wrenching performance ever given by someone who has no interest in being an actor.
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80You may leave this movie exhilarated by its no-holds-barred boldness or annoyed and bewildered at the unpredictable course it takes.
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75The song-and-dance numbers that make this musical tragedy a celebration of life despite its awfully grim climax.
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75A film of so much daring, a film that takes so many chances, it's impossible not to be impressed.
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75Ought to win a prize for sheer audacity.
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70This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.
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70Slow and depressing, but ultimately haunting film.
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63Leaves you questioning its intentions.
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60Aside from Bjork's astonishing performance, it's a grim tragedy that's deliberately drab and exceedingly painful to watch.
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60My only reason to recommend this movie is that there's nothing quite like it.
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50What is meant to be an innovative, cutting-edge musical melodrama is so jumbled, irrational and amateurish that it makes dinner theater look like the Old Vic.
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50If it weren't for a terrific central performance by the Icelandic pop singer Bjork, Dancer in the Dark would be all but unwatchable.
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50A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.
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50This is the kind of movie that has always polarized serious film folk, while the public usually elects to stay home and prune shrubs.
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50Like a naive modernist hymn made by someone who doesn't, deep down, believe in hymns.
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50Both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion.
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42Fairly incompetent as a musical and rather silly as a drama.
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40Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.
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40Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.
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30Björk holds the movie together, her natural charisma and the overwhelming intensity of her emotions should blind a lot of viewers to the ludicrousness of the story and the intentionally rotten videography.
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30At times the movie's crudeness has an eerie beauty, but the musical fantasies are a bewildering hash, and the protracted climax on death row is nearly unendurable.
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20So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.
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20A 2½-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that's artistically bankrupt on almost every level.