Manderlay.

The IFC Center in New York is wrapping its Lars von Trier retro with Jesper Jargil's The Humiliated, a making-of doc shot on the set of The Idiots and, writing in the Voice, J Hoberman finds it "more powerful than the movie it documents—more successfully Dogmatic and dramatic (almost a 'reality' version of The Blair Witch Project)."

Then it's on to the film at hand: "Where von Trier's 1994 TV miniseries The Kingdom was a mad mix of hospital soap opera, Saturday-morning supernaturalism, and genteel detective story, spiked with gross-out effects and served with a sneer, its 1997 sequel was only more, and consequently less, of the same," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "So too Manderlay, von Trier's disappointing Dogville sequel."

"[W]ho, beyond the gifted Danish filmmaker's ardent cult of admirers, will want to watch it?" asks Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "[M]ake no mistake: this deeply misanthropic, anti-American film insists the United States is ruled by crooks and gangsters and cursed by the legacy of slavery whose poison has seeped to its very core."

"You could say Manderlay deals with American problems," von Trier tells Jennifer Merin in the New York Press. "But that's just the film's surface. The problems aren't only American."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir finds it "maddening, hilarious, frustrating and invigorating, pretty much from moment to moment." So he writes an "ass-kissy email" von Trier.

"Why can't the Danish director be both a brilliant filmmaker and a loathsome creep?" asks Dana Stevens in Slate. "The answer, of course, is that he can and he is."

Marcy Dermansky for World / Independent Film: "Von Trier has finally lost me."

Ed Gonzalez at Slant: "Von Trier's foresight is uncanny (his hypothetical thesis corresponds with an egregious and avoidable chapter in America's modern history) and his complex understanding of race relations in our country is unmistakable, which is somewhat surprising given how little he understands our gun violence (see - or, rather, don't see - Dear Wendy).

Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer: "It may be that the director has overreached in Manderlay by trying to deal with racial conflicts in an excessively abstract manner. Since his chosen mise-en-scène is already dangerously abstract, he has piled on too many layers of disbelief for an audience to overcome."

The AV Club's Scott Tobias finds the film "loses in power what it lacks in novelty, even though it's more relevant than anything the year is likely to bring."

Posted by dwhudson at January 29, 2006 4:30 PM