It is a repulsive, perplexing piece of art. It is also brutally effective. Whether that's incentive enough to sit through this film depends largely on your threshold for pain.
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10/24/09
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Antichrist (2009)
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Reviews Counted:127
Fresh:63
Rotten:64
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: Gruesome, explicit and highly controversial; Lars Von Triers arthouse-horror, though beautifully shot, is no easy ride.
Rated: Not Rated
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Theatrical Release:2008
Box Office: $228,568
Synopsis: Only two actors, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Defoe, inhabit the space of this supernatural thriller directed by Lars Von Trier. The stars play a couple who attempt to grieve for their dead... [More]
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Reviews for Antichrist
Pretentious, explicit, and, at times, unequivocally ridiculous.
10/23/09
Artfully horrific but artificial and soulless.
10/23/09
If you can crawl out from under the hype, it definitely works in a kind of mad, ridiculous way.
10/23/09
The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.
10/23/09
Top CriticAdmiration can go to his sheer audacity but not to his execution of his ideas, which resonate with pretensions and a certain pomposity.
10/23/09
"Antichrist" is a curious mash-up of cutting-edge torture-porn and good old porn-porn that fails on both fronts.
10/23/09
Please don't take anything I've said to indicate that Antichrist isn't difficult to watch. It most certainly is, but as somebody (the Marquis de Sade, perhaps) once said: No pain, no gain.
10/23/09
Though it's hard to deny the fierce purity of Gainsbourg's performance, Antichrist plays like an incoherent mix of Gothic horror claptrap and Bergmanesque power struggle. I was more bored and puzzled than shattered and provoked.
10/23/09
Top CriticThe movie's story and meaning are not mysterious but deliberately impenetrable, faint gestures in all directions, absent of artistic integrity, intellectual rigor or emotional significance.
10/23/09
Top CriticYou can read all you want into Antichrist, but I think the basic summation of the film is simple -- Lars von Trier was depressed and he wanted you to be too.
10/22/09
For this kind of Satan-in-the-woods scenario, Von Trier is doing a little too much Scenes From a Marriage and not quite enough The Evil Dead.
10/22/09
Antichrist feels less like an art house film than a parody of one.
10/22/09
I can’t deny this is filled with powerfully primal images.
10/22/09
By turns repellent, powerful and ludicrous, Antichrist piles horror on horror with pitiless passion.
10/22/09
Top CriticAfter the infantile bludgeoning that is Antichrist), I feel no need to keep accompanying von Trier's career at all.
10/22/09
I'm inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with Antichrist when it was simply unstable but couldn't go with it when it turned insane. It's a useful distinction. And yet the first hour...is pretty stunning.
10/22/09
Top CriticThe movie immerses itself in the darkest despair imaginable, blending dystopian porn with ghastly horror and graphic violence. But it's all done in a mundane, almost clinical way.
10/22/09
neither a dismissible failure nor a cinematic success
10/22/09
For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema. On at least one level, it’s also hateful.
10/22/09
Latest News for Antichrist
November 26, 2009:
Ban Them All! 10 Infamously Controversial Movies
Death, despair and genital mutilation: only a great Dane could fuse all three into one brilliantly bleak, guaranteed nausea-inducing piece of cinema... which seems to blame all... More...
November 23, 2009:
"I Don't Hate Women": Lars von Trier on Antichrist
Danish auteur Lars von Trier is used to controversy following his films; some of his critics have even accused him of courting it for sensationalism and reaction. Yet even with... More...
October 22, 2009:
Critics Consensus: Astro Boy Doesn't Quite Soar
This week at the movies, we've got an anime hero (Astro Boy, with voice work from Kristen Bell and Nicolas Cage); a vampire war ( Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant,... More...
October 12, 2009:
Lars von Trier Blasts Off for Planet Melancholia 
Fresh from grossing everyone out with "Antichrist," Lars von Trier has announced that his next project will be a "psychological disaster film" titled "Planet Melancholia." More...
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