On Rotten Tomatoes, the crucial consensus for “Melancholia” reads: “‘Melancholia’s’ dramatic tips are extra apparent than they need to be, however that is in any other case a showcase for Kirsten Dunst’s appearing and for Lars von Trier’s profound, visceral imaginative and prescient of melancholy and destruction.” If this looks as if an excellent signal for the movie’s general score, you would be proper; it earned a stable 80% on the evaluation aggregator, and it additionally acquired plenty of accolades. After the movie premiered on the Cannes Movie Competition, Dunst received the pageant’s award for Greatest Actress, each the New York Movie Critics On-line and the Nationwide Society of Movie Critics named it the one of many high movies of 2011, and far in a while in 2019, publications like Vulture ranked it among the many absolute best movies of the last decade.
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Anyway, what about particular person critics? For IndieWire, Lisa Rosman wrote, “In ‘Melancholia,’ [Lars] von Trier has created a mission assertion of a masterpiece, one which reminds us that nihilism itself can function a authentic type of creation, a method in addition to The Finish.” Bob Mondello appeared to agree; as he put it in his evaluation for NPR, “It is a planet that may’t come quickly sufficient for her, however one which I stored keen away. Not, I am just a little embarrassed to say, to avoid wasting humanity from ‘Melancholia,’ however merely to remain on this outstanding film’s presence just a bit longer.” Over at Slate, Dana Stevens appeared barely extra combined however nonetheless arrived at a constructive conclusion — “There’s one thing concerning the solemn, gloomy, typically overwhelmingly highly effective expertise of watching ‘Melancholia.’ I am going to give it this a lot: It is a laborious film to neglect” — and Andrew O’Hehir known as it “essentially the most composed and exquisite and conspicuously grownup movie of [von Trier’s] profession” in his evaluation for Salon. Leisure Weekly‘s critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, in the meantime, had a few of the most effusive reward for the movie, writing, “Though ‘Melancholia,’ by its very title, declares a mournful way of thinking, the film is, in actual fact, the work of a person whose gradual emergence from private disaster has resulted in a shifting masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of imaginative and prescient.”
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Not each critic was absolutely on board with “Melancholia,” although. As Mike D’Angelo wrote for The AV Membership, “There is a disconnect right here between idea and execution — a kind of desultory, moment-to-moment clumsiness — that makes ‘Melancholia’ really feel like remedy poorly disguised as drama.” Over at Slant Journal, Ed Gonzalez agreed: “‘Melancholia’ is a movie of few epiphanies and even fewer insights, and as clever because the movie’s doom and gloom could also be, its symbolism flounders.” Actually, the movie is not for everybody — however nonetheless, evaluations have been overwhelmingly constructive. So, what has Dunst been doing since her lauded efficiency in “Melancholia?”
