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Why Movies Are (Mostly) Trash These Days and What Needs to Happen to Fix Them

We need more idiots with cameras!

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Mr. Lars von Trier is a self-proclaimed idiot. And he made the polarizing yet truly inventive film Idiotene (1998), or Dogme #2, for idiots and about a group of idiots. Idiotene, which I initially decided to watch after seeing that celebrity author Karl Ove Knausgård had given his endorsement, just might provoke your pearl-clutching indignation with (what may initially appear to be) its brazenly bad taste. During my first viewing, I had to keep pausing this graphic oddity because I was laughing so hard it hurt. But in the end, the profound meaning, which is revealed by way of the absurd, earned my tears in streams. (Von Trier has a knack for making women weep, as his previous masterpiece, Breaking the Waves, caused Georgia Brown of The Village Voice to run out of its 1996 Cannes screening crying, with rock-star journalist Janet Maslin of NYT following to comfort her.) The outrageous shenanigans throughout Idiotene make sense and are justified when one considers what Mr. von Trier, the auto-diagnosed “best film director in the world,” truly had in mind. I could discuss this milestone and what I take away from it endlessly. However, that is a rant for another time…

In 2025, I watched a film by a different notable Nordic director responsible for another one of my favorite movies… In infinite respects, it was thoroughly insufferable — a big empty, albeit ambitious, slab of rubbish, or what one might call ego fuel for those vanilla and undiscriminating normies wishing to pride themselves on their self-perceived depth, sensitivity, and rarefied nature. Needless to say, the film failed to activate a single one of my facial muscles, except to yawn. Alright, I’ll admit: I couldn’t resist a solitary smile upon seeing a Danish veteran actor step in to make a cameo of sorts. Having been a script reader and knowing more than a bit about acting, I could dissect the audio-visual banality in question bit by bit. And yet, since it is genius that isn’t typically received kindly in its own time, this contrived two-plus-hour pretext for adults to pat themselves on the back for the feat of having endured it would garner comparisons to the work of the immortal Ingmar Bergman — as if there were any modern-day Bergmans, Dreyers, or Tarkovskys. (And where are the genuinely fascinating characters like Agnès Varda?)

Hollywood Needs More Weirdos Like Lars von Trier

I came away from this-since awarded soporific with a sense of sadness, resulting both from now having to bear the memory of one of my favorite actors participating in something so worthless as well as disappointment in the director. Granted, I shouldn’t have been at all surprised that the now-Conformist Without a (Much of a) Cause exposed his true (gray and beige) colors, as his loss of edge even predated his perilous transition to fatherhood, which can either dull or enrich a person’s perspective. Yet, fortunately, there is a silver lining: My respect for Scandinavia’s true reigning king, “The Boss of It All,” was renewed. Thank you, Lars von Trier, for your completely uncompromising, incorrigibly obnoxious (in a real way, not a pandering marionette way), and forever utterly brilliant approach to cinema. Von Trier does not seem to have lost an ounce of that childlike wonder with which he animated his first short film as an 11-year-old, Turen til Squashland (1967), and he continues to impart that same unshakeable, (ir)reverent, wide-eyed awe in audiences. His titles aren’t messy and outlandish because they are flawed, but because they are human and impregnated with the (oftentimes manipulative) unpredictability of life. Von Trier delivers raw emotion, transformative power, and everlasting cinematic images. In short, the rogue Lars von Trier is everything that the vast majority of prevailing filmmakers are not — an auteur genius, brave, inspired, inventive, chokingly hard to........

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