Who's in It: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach De Bankole, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe, Jeremy Davies, Chloë Sevigny, Lauren Bacall
The Basics: This the second part of Danish director Lars Von Trier's United States trilogy. It's set on a plantation in 1933 Alabama, a place that time forgot and where slavery never ended. Along comes Grace (Howard) to right the wrong and enforce both democracy and revenge. This is the guy who made Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville (part one of a planned threegie). Do you think it'll have a happy ending?
What's the Deal? A quick primer on Von Trier: he's a career Bad Boy whose apparent life goal as a director is to antagonize everyone and destroy cinema. And that's why even when he's spinning his wheels and making preachy symbolic films (and that's exactly what he's doing here), you still feel as though you have to pay attention to him. It's kind of like when there's a little kid constantly poking you and going, "Hey, look at this mud pie I made! Now eat it!" In other words, I think he's great.
Why It's Boring: If you saw Dogville, then you've mostly seen this one already. It's staged on an open theater set again, kind of like Our Town, and everyone and everything is a metaphor. Only this one doesn't have Nicole Kidman. And its style means that only lefty art-house people (a k a the Choir That Gets Preached To) are going to go see it, and those folks are already on board with the big ideas of Racism Is Still With Us and American Imperialism Is Awful.
Who's Cool: Glover as the sarcastic right-hand man of new plantation boss-lady Grace.
Xenophobic? Afraid to Fly? One other thing about Von Trier — he's never set foot in America, but he's set most of his recent films here. This bothers some critics. A lot. But what's cool about his refusal to come here is that it makes his movies more pure than if he had visited for a month and then tried to figure out this huge place. You want to know what educated Europeans who've never been here think of the U.S.? Here it is.