The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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Nymph()maniac: Volume I (2013)

A man comes across a woman lying in an alley, takes her home and tends to her and while she talks him through every sexual encounter she has ever had in her life, he interjects with fly fishing analogies, in this occasionally very funny, always interesting first volume of director Lars von Trier's epic five-and-a-half hour contemplation on compulsive passionless sex, just one highlight of which is the mortifying but hilarious scene in which Uma Thurman as a spurned wife, the antithesis of Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe, tries to guilt-trip her husband and his new lover.

★★★★☆

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