Dogville

Ninety minutes into Lars Von Trier’s three-hour experimental drama, the painfully slow pacing had us so bored we nearly got up and left. That would have been a mistake. Staged with deliberate artificiality and an icy-bleak view of the human condition, Dogville is not easy to watch or to love. But this nightmare parallel to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny,” comes with a powerful and uncompromising ending that had us talking for hours afterward. Von Trier fails in his apparent attempt to define a specifically American form of evil, but if you can stand a little face-to-face with grim existentialism, Dogville has real bite. Oak Street; 309 Oak St. S.E.; Minneapolis (612) 331-3134, mnfilmarts.org. Uptown; 2906 Hennepin Ave.; Minneapolis; (612) 925-6006; landmarktheatres.com
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