Metacritic reviews

A star rating is not much help, since von Trier’s self-conscious arrogance is calculated to split audiences into extremist factions, but Antichrist delivers enough beauty, terror and wonder to qualify as the strangest and most original horror movie of the year.

Bottom line: Do I recommend Antichrist? Tough to do, but tough not to. For those who are intrigued by the controversy, it may be worth the sacrifice, if only so you can evaluate it from a position of knowledge.

Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made.

Depending on your reaction to the cinematic outrages perpetrated by Danish director Lars von Trier (remember Dogville?), you might want to add or subtract two stars from the halfway (half-assed?) rating I just gave Antichrist.

It would be a shock if Antichrist had turned out to be anything but shocking.

The trouble is, it's all too exhibitionistic to ring true. The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.

Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience--the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.

Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist. As if deliberately courting critical abuse, the Danish bad boy densely packs this theological-psychological horror opus with grotesque, self-consciously provocative images.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

If only von Trier could work beyond the poster art concept. Antichrist stubbornly fails as a gothic nightmare and meanders as a misanthropic two-character drama.