Lars von Trier’s 15 Best Feature Films Ranked

15. “Manderlay” (2005)

Lars von Trier’s projected “USA: Land of Opportunities” trilogy fizzled out with this sequel to “Dogville,” swapping in Bryce Dallas Howard for Nicole Kidman as Grace Mulligan, a gangster’s daughter stumbling through hellish chapters in American history. Here, 1933 Alabama is reimagined as a (once again) minimally set-designed Southern microcosm of the U.S. where abolition never reached this corner of the country, and slavery still exists. The novelistic grandeur and even the sick-grinned humor of “Dogville” is lost here in service of a solemn allegory that doesn’t quite land coming from a Dane who refuses to step foot in the U.S., though it’s never less than compelling to see von Trier continue to operate at the height of his ambitions — even if he collapses beneath them.

14. “Epidemic” (1987)

Von Trier didn’t shy from professing his fascination with, well, his own self and craft, with only his second feature, 1987’s “Epidemic.” This grainy, black-and-white sophomore effort is two movies in one, and neither is especially enjoyable. In the first, von Trier and his screenwriter Niels Vørsel play themselves, at an impasse over a (totally noncommercial) new film project about a deadly plague that offers none of the lurid thrills of its presence. The other is that movie itself, with von Trier (not so skilled as an actor) playing a doctor trying to stop the spread. Still, without “Epidemic,” we wouldn’t have von Trier’s longtime collaboration with Udo Kier, an avowed decadent beautifully matched to the filmmaker’s sick sensibilities.

13. “The Idiots” (1998)

“The Idiots” is Lars von Trier’s first film under the Dogme 95 manifesto he developed with Thomas Vinterberg, dictating that in order for directors to wrest power as the authors of their work, a movie needed to emphasize story and character over special effects and technology. Vinterberg responded that same year with “The Celebration,” while von Trier made this 1998 film (entirely on digital cameras) about a group of disaffected anti-bourgeois adults who decide to unfetter their inhibitions by behaving publicly as disabled adults. This problematic concept doesn’t age well at all, but with its borderline softcore-porn sex scenes and unmarketable artiness, the film never reached a healthy American audience anyway.

12. “The Boss of It All” (2006)

Von Trier returned to his Danish, low-budget roots, while sacrificing none of his Brechtian control over his content and subjects, for “The Boss of It All.” Think of this barbed, haute European comedy as “The Office” by way of the director of “Dancer in the Dark,” a feature-length joke using his self-coined techniqued of Automavision, in which a computer essentially controls a camera’s movements. In the von Trier canon, this film about an IT company CEO who hires an actor to impersonate him during an acquisition is an eccentric one-off, but probably a breath of fresh air for audiences and the filmmaker himself after a string of movies about pain and religious levels of suffering.

11. “The Element of Crime” (1984)

In terms of set design, Lars von Trier’s debut film is a masterclass in dystopian decay and rot, casting a seedy Cairo stalked by a serial killer in monochrome, anemic light. The pervasive sepia tone that burnishes this story of an expat detective (played by Michael Elphick) seeking a murderer of women becomes almost unbearable, as it perhaps was for the filmmaker, who abandoned it entirely for his black-and-white next film, “Epidemic.” “The Element of Crime’s” turgid dreamlike atmosphere at moments parodically recalls the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker von Trier has never been ashamed to crib from. It’s a grim, meaty world, boldly announcing a misanthropic filmmaker with a bleak view of the world.

10. “The Five Obstructions” (2003)

Von Trier’s cruel affinity for implicating his collaborators in his own self-flagellation achieves its apex in “The Five Obstructions,” a documentary in which he asks fellow Danish artist Jørgen Leth to remake his own movie, “The Perfect Human,” five times, and with each a different challenge. Leth is tasked with remaking his short film in Cuba, Mumbai, Brussels, with split-screen, as a rotoscope cartoon, and finally, with providing voiceover narration for von Trier’s own spin on “The Perfect Human.” Together, they’re a winning intellectual match, with Leth game to enable von Trier’s inward-facing navel-gazing. But in unison, they lay a path that could easily be retread by future filmmakers.

9. “The House That Jack Built” (2018)

Probably von Trier’s most sadistic, and certainly his most self-aware, film directly addresses and then defies his critics, and he mostly outdoes himself in conjuring a sick sort of Bildungsroman about the development and life of a psychopath, played by Matt Dillon. It’s stuffed with eccentrics who mostly die quick, quick deaths, including the woman Dillon’s character picks up on the side of the highway and then kills with a tire iron, played by Uma Thurman, and the unfortunately named Simple, played by Riley Keough. It all builds to perhaps von Trier’s most audacious sequence ever as Jack (Dillon) descends into the inner circles of hell, painted as classical tableaux vivant drenched in blood and brimstone.

8. “Medea” (1988)

Of course Lars von Trier would make a made-for-TV drama based on Euripides’ scorching Greek tragedy about the former princess of Colchis who takes out her husband Jason’s new wife and her own two children after he leaves her. The tale easily lays the groundwork for his many fascinations to come with women scorned by the world, but it also remains one of his most powerful films, with Kirsten Olesen serving up a wrenching Medea and Udo Kier absolutely (and as usual) degrading himself to play the role of a bedraggled Jason steeped in filth. Von Trier works from an unproduced screenplay by Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose measured, austere approach to hallowed material continues to inspire the director’s work.

7. “Europa” (1991)

Max von Sydow sets the stage for “Europa” as the film’s hypnotic voiceover narrator, pulling you into a Kafkaesque (quite literally, as von Trier drew from the German author’s novel “Amerika”) 1945 Germany after World War II, where an American pacifist (Jean-Marc Barr) works as sleep-car conductor. But all is not what it seems in this highly stylized world, where actors perform against rear-projected backdrops as a noirlike Nazi conspiracy unfolds, and Leopold (Barr) falls for a dangerous German femme fatale (Fassbinder favorite Barbara Sukowa). Though the film won three prizes for its technical leaps and bounds at the Cannes Film Festival, that wasn’t enough for von Trier, who reportedly flipped the jury off when he didn’t win the Palme d’Or. He’d go on to win it in 2000 for “Dancer in the Dark,” though as a self-consciously melodramatic, maximalist outlier in von Trier’s gritty, documentary-like films to come, “Europa” remains one of his most successful film experiments.

6. “Nymphomaniac” Vols. I and II (2013)

Leave it to our gloomiest living filmmaker to create an oddly tender epic about a woman’s sexual education. That woman, Joe, is played with feral fearlessness by Charlotte Gainsbourg, and in recounting her coital past, the film becomes a psychosexual picaresque — and a truly twisted character study. Framing the story is the banter between Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard, equally discomfiting and hilarious. (Actual line from the film, spoken by Skarsgard after Gainsbourg reveals lurid details of her past: “That’s an excellent parallel to river trout fishing!”) Volume II plates up darker meat than its predecessor, as Joe is forced to confront of her demons, and develops a mutually satisfying (if grim) relationship with an S&M practictioner played by Jamie Bell, among many other transcendent horrors.

5. “Antichrist” (2009)

In terms of screenwriting, Lars von Trier is ever the master of a powerfully delivered maxim, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s venomous “Nature is Satan’s church” in “Antichrist” belongs in his hall of fame. While moments like a talking, disemboweled fox growling “Chaos reigns!” have been ripped out of context and kitschiefied since this movie rocked the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, the sum of its parts is worth returning to. Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe sink themselves completely into playing grieving parents engaged in a hugely inappropriate psychologist-patient relationship. And von Trier with just as much grim determination pours his pained soul out into the script, once again turning an astonishing leading actress into the vessel for his misery. This is also the film that elevated von Trier’s visual palette to what can only be described as sublime, courtesy of Anthony Dodd Mantle’s haunted, slow-burn imagery.

4. “Dancer in the Dark” (2000)

“Dancer in the Dark” is a punishing experience enlivened by an all-time performance from Björk who deservedly won Best Actress at Cannes for walking through hell with von Trier, and arriving intact on the other side. She’s a bursting tap of emotion as Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant put through the wringer in 1960s America, escaping her lot in life through song and dance. While the non-musical sequences are grounded in von Trier’s shaky, verite, low-budget style, the music numbers really take off, delivering some of the director’s most colorfully expressionistic filmmaking to date. The choreography, like in the train-track-side “I’ve Seen It All” or the exuberant crash-bang-pop of “Cvalda” that turns factory hardware into a churning orchestra, soars above this otherwise hopeless kitchen-sink tragedy.

3. “Dogville” (2003)

“Dogville” went off like a bomb at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, dividing American and international critics’ for Lars von Trier’s three-hour-long screed against class lines in the United States, here situated into Depression-era Colorado. Nicole Kidman, chained to a giant metal wheel throughout much of the movie and subjected to repeated acts of torture by the townspeople who embrace her character Grace with razor-blade arms, wouldn’t work with von Trier again.

This is a movie experience you sink into, like a great big novel, with an immense ensemble including Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson, Paul Bettany, Ben Gazzara, James Caan, Chloe Sevigny, and John Hurt. The message-hammering can prove challenging, but von Trier deserves applause for his ingenious staging, stripping the film set to its bare armature, allowing “Dogville” to unfold like a play that could also only ever be wholly cinematic by design. In a making-of documentary included on the DVD, Kidman turns to the camera with a twisted grin and says, “Help me.” She isn’t kidding.

2. “Breaking the Waves” (1996)

Twenty-five years later, “Breaking the Waves” has lost none of its power, not only as the breakout vehicle for a then-unknown Emily Watson as a martyr in the Scottish Highlands trying to save her paralyzed husband’s life, but also as the film that brought von Trier American attention. Watson was Best Actress-nominated for her performance as Bess McNeill, a naive young woman despised by her Calvinist community for marrying a non-religious oil rigger (Stellan Skarsgard). With “Breaking the Waves,” von Trier began to break away from the spartan rules of the Dogme 95 movement he launched with Thomas Vinterberg, painting on a bigger canvas with post-production flourishes and non-diegetic music to create a fully formed cinematic experience.

1. “Melancholia” (2011)

As Justine in Lars von Trier’s masterful end-of-days drama “Melancholia,” Kirsten Dunst professes, in the face of utter, inexplicable doom, that she “knows things.” Which is why when her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) suggests that, in Earth’s final hours, they decamp to the terrace to drink champagne and sing songs, Dunst’s vacant and pained-eyed Justine suggests, “Why don’t we meet on the fucking toilet?” There is something quietly heroic about Justine’s decision to ditch her perfect husband on their wedding night, quit her soul-sucking advertising job, and screw the best man on the golf course because, why the hell not? Our lives are over, anyway.

Dunst and von Trier are an alchemical pairing, with the actress carrying the Dane’s gigantic metaphor for depression on her shoulders. Dunst perfectly portrays a woman in crisis, a stand-in for a crumbling planet but also a very real person. At the end of the world, what really matters anymore? “Life is only on Earth, and not for long,” she says. A toast to oblivion.