What the critics really said about that wet kitchy film Dancer in The Dark
		"The legend of Lars Von Trier — part deserved, part self-constructed — comes crashing to the ground with Dancer in the Dark, a 21/2-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that’s artistically bankrupt on almost every level." Derek Elley, Variety "The movie is both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion. Come to the theater prepared, with a handkerchief in one hand and a rotten tomato in the other." A.O. Scott New York Times "[It] has to be the most sensationally silly film of the year - as well as the most shallow and crudely manipulative." Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian "A disaster in every department: Lars von Trier's bragging big "musical" starring Björk is one of the worst wastes of talent that any director's ego has perpetrated on a gullible public. The scenes at the jail, when Björk sings a ditty to bring comfort to her condemned cellmates, only confirms there should be a Death Row specially reserved for pop singers." Alexander Walker, The Evening Standard "How could anyone have admired or been moved by this tedious, banal, incompetent movie?" Philip French, The Observer "It's not just that the [musical] numbers are berserkly bad; they also don't seem to have any emotional connection to this bedraggled, Dickensian waif. Von Trier puts Selma through so many motions of sorrow and cruelty that the film turns into a masochist's orgy." Peter Ranier New York Magazine "Dancer in the Dark is a crock. At once kitschy and contrived, ''Dancer in the Dark'' is a grandiloquent exercise in holier than thou martyrdom." Owen Glieberman Entertainment Weekly "This is one of those supposedly feminist films in which a woman chooses martyrdom when it would take about five minutes to clear everything up. Björk has managed to convince herself that she's playing a saint, but I wouldn't be surprised if von Trier just thinks the essential nature of women is masochistic idiocy." David Edelstein Slate.com "To call Dancer in the Dark melodramatic is to say the least. The plot would shame D.W. Griffith. The circumstances that drive Björk to murder turn the movie from the merely hopeless to the actively unpleasant." J. Hoberman, The Village Voice Dancer in the Dark is a large glob of aggrandized trash. [The] plot might just barely have been acceptable in nineteenth century melodrama…Here it is cheap sausage meat forced into an arty casing. Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic Read What I Wrote HOME /