Better Late Then Never

An action-packed slog

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Lars Von Trier was a notorious infant terriblé at his Danish film school, a mini Mussolini who felt compelled from an early age to drain the swamp of traditional Danish cinema with its age old reliance on "folksy" comedies. But twenty some years later he acknowledges his own foibles with this biting but sweet satire of film school machinations and the cement-headed teachers and state-employed film "consultants" that arbitrarily provide the funds and subsidies the small and always hard-pressed industry lives by here. But his alter ego, Erik is no cynical critic or ultra-ambitious manipulator, but instead a naive youth, unwilling or unable to conspire in order to get ahead - something Von Trier apparently never found distasteful or problematic. Von Trier has always been fueled by an ambiguity, his need to both elevate and castigate women, his knowledge of having to live in a world of fools and his remorse for his monumental sense of superiority. This need to have his cake and want to eat it too has caused him near paralytic depression at times, and this jolly film was a marvelous but brief elevator of his many mood swings. See it. Enjoy it. Though not directed by Von Trier, the film's production values are superb. Film students will love this film as they will think Von Trier is describing everyone in their world but them.