| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A thrilling, audacious work.
|
| 100 |
Miami Herald
One of the most searing experiences to be had at the movies this year.
|
| 90 |
Rolling Stone
For all its fancy pedigree, the spellbinding Dancer in the Dark aims right for the heart and aces its target.
|
| 89 |
Mr. Showbiz
Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.
|
| 88 |
San Francisco Examiner
A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
(The film is) one of the most anguished, intense and weirdly brilliant of the year.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
It is a bold, reckless gesture.
|
| 88 |
Charlotte Observer
Can be unbearably moving or annoyingly mawkish, sometimes in the same scene.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
You may leave this movie exhilarated by its no-holds-barred boldness or annoyed and bewildered at the unpredictable course it takes.
|
| 80 |
Newsweek
Bjork gives what may be the most wrenching performance ever given by someone who has no interest in being an actor.
|
| 80 |
Film.com
This is a film like no other this year, and on that grounds alone you should see it.
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
A film of so much daring, a film that takes so many chances, it's impossible not to be impressed.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
The song-and-dance numbers that make this musical tragedy a celebration of life despite its awfully grim climax.
|
| 75 |
Portland Oregonian
Ought to win a prize for sheer audacity.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.
|
| 70 |
Film.com
Slow and depressing, but ultimately haunting film.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
Leaves you questioning its intentions.
|
| 60 |
Chicago Reader
My only reason to recommend this movie is that there's nothing quite like it.
|
| 60 |
TV Guide
Aside from Bjork's astonishing performance, it's a grim tragedy that's deliberately drab and exceedingly painful to watch.
|
| 50 |
The New York Times
Both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Like a naive modernist hymn made by someone who doesn't, deep down, believe in hymns.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
What 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.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
This is the kind of movie that has always polarized serious film folk, while the public usually elects to stay home and prune shrubs.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
If it weren't for a terrific central performance by the Icelandic pop singer Bjork, Dancer in the Dark would be all but unwatchable.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Fairly incompetent as a musical and rather silly as a drama.
|
| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
Two-and-a-half hour slice of unmitigated depression.
|
| 40 |
Salon.com
Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.
|
| 30 |
Slate
At 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.
|
| 30 |
Dallas Observer
Björk 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.
|
| 20 |
Los Angeles Times
So 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.
|
| 20 |
Variety
A 2½-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that's artistically bankrupt on almost every level.
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