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“Melancholia,” an excursion from the sad to the sublime by way of the preposterous

an emotional disorder described by Freud as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”

The expectation of punishment is, of course, one reason people go to a Lars von Trier movie in the first place.

this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict

Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski

Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications

there is also Idris Elba covered in gold armor, looking like a cross between the Wall Street bull and an Oscar statuette.

the absolute and unbroken mediocrity of “Thor” is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad.

Thor” is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.

Presumably filmed in Denmark, and set in a weirdly stateless, featureless location – a sort of Scando-amerika

The montage of images at the beginning is interesting, as are some of the lush, hyper-real tableaux, like the dream sequences from Antichrist

the wedding reception scene is nowhere near as good as Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (the obvious model): it is tedious and exasperatingly redundant

Henry Jenkins argues that familiarity with video games makes Inception easier to understand. That last point is quite interesting: is Inception the first great video game movie? Not based on one specific game, but rather, on the whole stylistic structure of video game storytelling?

Jenkins points out how much of Inception rests on the notion of different “levels,” and of worlds within worlds. (More than a few people have pointed out the similarity between Inception‘s “Snow” dream and an early level in Modern Warfare 2.

Quentin Tarantino, who completed his screenplay for upcoming movie Django Unchained on 26 April and earlier this week woke to discover half the blogosphere had already read it.

Django Unchained seems to be an homage to Sergio Leone set in the deep south (rather than the old west) which tackles the predictably difficult subject of 19th-century American slavery. The lead character is a black slave-turned-gunslinger named Django.

the film appears to feature a plum role for Christoph Waltz, the Austrian actor whose performance as a dastardly SS colonel in Inglourious Basterds was rewarded with an Oscar last year. The part is that of a German bounty hunter and former dentist named Dr King Schlutz, who teaches Django the art of contract killing before helping him to find his still-enslaved wife.

Melancholia, a potent beauty of a film

Von Trier opens with a surreal hint of things to come, set to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde,"

The luminous Dunst deservedly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. Her incomparable performance, a slow accumulation of moods from despair to euphoria, never strikes a false note.

Harris, who worked for the Sunday Times and the BBC when Blair came to power, was once friendly with the P.M. but later soured on his political decisions, especially Blair's support of the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris's score-settling.

The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth.

Mr. Shawn has amusingly chosen to acknowledge this paradox in the new production that opened last night at the Acorn Theater, directed by Scott Elliott for the New Group. The evening begins with a Champagne reception (Pommery, no less) held on the stage a half-hour before showtime. Mr. Shawn can be seen mingling with hoi polloi, the dome of his bald head bobbing genially as he exchanges chitchat with audience members. (At the reviewed performance, not-so-hoi polloi gathering onstage included the novelist William Kennedy, the playwright Tina Howe and the actor Ethan Hawke.)

Despite the density and richness of its language, however, “The Fever” doesn’t go very deep in its analysis of the fundamental causes of the world’s inequities or posit any rational ideas about how they could be eased. Mr. Shawn is limited by the scope of the narrator’s experience, of course — an economist or political scientist he is not — but the resulting narrative circles around a few basic conclusions that seem thinner and more obvious the more they are illustrated or simply repeated.

Mr. Shawn’s literary models are more likely Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and at its best, “The Fever” does achieve the hypnotic force of those explorers of the uncanny.

Melancholia marks the major return of the artist’s vitality,

the movie starts off with nothing less than the end of the world: two planets colliding in Kubrickian grandeur to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

if Von Trier has gotten there, it is largely due to the vivid yet mysterious presence of Kirsten Dunst

Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work

Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work

Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work

From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia

If an auteur is a director with an obsessive personal vision — or, in simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies — then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren't drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson's own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there was his 1977 sexual encounter with a 13-year-old; when he thought he was sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest.

The kinship to Polanski's oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director's 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil's autobiography.

a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular.

Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we're really not on Martha's Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can't set foot there