'Our Town' put through the wringer

There are directors I love, directors I hate, and then there's Lars von Trier, the guy who's going to give me bipolar disorder. Go back and look at my reviews of his films. I called 1997's "Breaking the Waves" "daring" and "deeply moving" and praised von Trier for returning "magic to cinema." Fast forward to late 2000 and "Dancer in the Dark": "an uneven, misguided and arrogant work" in which "von Trier seems to be daring the viewer to resist the story's inanities"; "a fraud of a movie" that "falls flat on its ass."

Nicole Kidman in Lars von Trier's "Dogville"

Well, average out those two reviews, and you end up where I am with the Danish director's latest work, "Dogville," which, as with the above two films, drops a pure-hearted, put-upon heroine into a narrow-minded community. The great and the gawdawful are here in equal portions as von Trier's curious blend of emotional intensity and postmodern distancing cancels itself out.