Melancholia 2011

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: For stretches of the film, von Trieria is as welcome as Siberia. You must stay to the end for a potent payoff, when the tragic magic of the opening scenes is reasserted. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Depression finally seems to have brought out the best in Lars von Trier: "Melancholia" is his strongest work in a while, a devastatingly beautiful, operatic mixture of all his signature themes and visual schemes. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Watching "Melancholia'' is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy "Melancholia," rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: Although Melancholia, by its very title, declares a mournful state of mind, the movie is, in fact, the work of a man whose slow emergence from personal crisis has resulted in a moving masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of vision. Read more

Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: ...even when I was getting a little fed up with the film I was still almost entirely engaged by it. Your own reaction will depend on your own indulgence, I suspect. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: "Melancholia" is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: It's truly Von Trier's film, from the baroque style he employs to the personal aspects of the protagonist's straight-outta-DSM-V symptoms. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: It's about depression, but it isn't depressing at all. In the hands of Mr. von Trier, himself no stranger to emotional distress, bedazzlement is depression's surprising byproduct. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Nearly everyone in this film is unlikeable, their actions inexplicable. And the pace is so lugubrious that it's hard not to succumb to Justine's glum mood. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: Where did Melancholia come from? It's best not to ask. The explanation for the planet's origins is so preposterous that veteran science-fiction writers everywhere must be rolling their eyes. Read more

Mike D'Angelo, AV Club: There's a disconnect here between concept and execution -- a sort of desultory, moment-to-moment clumsiness -- that makes Melancholia feel like therapy poorly disguised as drama. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: With a nod to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, von Trier uses the proximity of a mysterious planet more as the basis for existential drama than science fiction. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: "Melancholia" is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on depression that is as likely to exasperate as many people as it moves. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Apocalyptic visions are nothing new in cinema, but they're almost always epic in scale; Von Trier's innovation is to peer down the large end of the telescope, observing the end of the world in painfully intimate terms. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: No one creates richer overtures on screen than von Trier. As "Melancholia" begins, music from Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" floods a series of discrete, striking images. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Dunst gives a strong, hard-bitten performance even though she is playing an attitude rather than a character. Read more

Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: A severe and ecstatic work of art. Read more

Christine Champ, Film.com: Melancholia floats in an air of supernatural malaise and tension, a melancholy mirrored in everything and everyone. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: The end of the world, von Trier-style, is a middling thing as a film. Read more

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: It is a lighter Von Trier, a lovely Von Trier, a seriously romantic Von Trier that emerges from "Melancholia," and I quite hope he stays around. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Von Trier has thought his conceit through, and his vision was thorough enough to attract a superb cast to join him on his one-way joyride to hell. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Melancholia will haunt you for days, maybe weeks. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: Von Trier's latest fable is nothing without its blaze of majesty -- or, as his detractors would say, its bombast. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Pain isn't the path to sainthood but, often, only more misery. There's nothing beautiful about it at all. Except, perhaps, to von Trier, who continues to find it inspiring -- particularly when it's being visited upon pale, pretty, naked young women. Read more

Bob Mondello, NPR: It's a planet that can't come soon enough for her, but one that I kept willing away. Not, I'm a little embarrassed to say, to save humanity from Melancholia, but simply to stay in this remarkable movie's presence just a little longer. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: It is unsettling and confounding but also beautiful and damned. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: One of the year's most emotionally resonant art movies. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: What, exactly, is the point? Only the director of a pile of crap that includes Dogma, Dancer in the Dark and Antichrist knows for sure, and even that is severely doubtful. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Melancholia is a remarkable mood piece with visuals to die for (excuse the pun), and a performance from Dunst that runs the color spectrum of emotions. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Unfortunately, in his pursuit of an artistic vision, von Trier has thrown logic, physics, and coherence out the window. Read more

Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com: Bizarre, sometimes tedious, occasionally amazing. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: If I were choosing a director to make a film about the end of the world, von Trier the gloomy Dane might be my first choice. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Melancholia is a potent beauty of a film, and Kirsten Dunst gives an incomparable performance. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: The most composed and beautiful and conspicuously adult film of [von Trier's] career... Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: There's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: No moviemaker I know creates psychodramas so hard to watch and difficult to forget. If we esteem Sylvia Plath, Vincent van Gogh and Samuel Beckett, Von Trier deserves our attention, too. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: It's a credit to the director's persistence of vision that he finds such eerie images to adorn this wispy tree of death. Like a newborn planet, "Melancholia" is magnetically beautiful, but it's also an unformed mass of hot air. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: The apocalypse has never looked better. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: The drama is clunky, but the visual experience paradoxically uplifting. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: It's the Lars von Trier movie for people who hate Lars von Trier movies. (Or for this person, at any rate.) Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: Von Trier takes his title at face value and infuses his film with a laidback, removed air, too free of real ideas, in contrast to the careful working of his imagery. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Von Trier remains a potent writer/director and master manipulator of images and moods. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: [The] mind-blowing Melancholia offers perhaps the gentlest depiction of annihilation one could imagine from any director, much less the Danish provocateur. Read more

J. Hoberman, Village Voice: We are alone, and yet Melancholia dares to imagine (and insist we do as well) the one event that might bring us all together. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: A masterwork of grandeur, millennial angst and high romantic style, "Melancholia" takes themes that have marked the best films of 2011 and spins them into a blast of cosmic sparkle dust. Read more