I am no fan of aging enfant terribleLars von Trier (“Dogville”), who today announced to a Cannes Film Festival press conference, “I am the greatest director in the world.” Variety’s normally reliable Todd McCarthy
that Lars “cuts a big fat art-film fart” with “Antichrist,” which stunk up the Riviera on Sunday. “As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images that might have impressed even Hieronymus Bosch, as the director pursues personal demons of sexual, religious and esoteric bodily harm, as well as feelings about women that must be a comfort to those closest to him,” McCarthy writes. “Traveling deep into NC-17 territory, this may prove a great date movie for pain-is-pleasure couples. Otherwise, most of the director’s usual fans will find this outing risible, off-putting or both — derisive hoots were much in evidence during and after the Cannes press screening — while the artiness quotient is far too high for mainstream-gore groupies.” Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Tribune
: to be waiting to see which way the critical (breaking) wind blows: “I am of roughly 17 minds on this quite possibly virtually literally insane psychological thriller. Charlotte Gainsbourg, above, portrays a grieving mother who succumbs to her inner demons after the death of her child. In an ecstatically cruel prologue she and her therapist husband (Willem Dafoe) make love while their son falls to his death from an open window down the hall.” Wait, it all leads “up to an act of such vicious, outlandishly graphic self-mutilation, the worst (in every way) of what’s shown renders the insinuating torments of the first hour almost irrelevant.” Mahola Dargis of the New York Times reportedly was trilling “That’s Entertainment” on the way out of the screening.