Thoughts on Lars von Trier as a director?

Dogville and Melancholia are both fantastic. Two of my favorites for sure.
Breaking the Waves is pretty good.
Antichrist I'm kind of mixed on. I lean towards liking it more than not but a lot of it just didn't work for me. I think pretty highly of Trier's ability as a director, usually love Dafoe, and have no problem with disturbing/graphic stuff in movies, but for one reason or another this one falls kind of flat for me.

That's all I've seen. Dancer in the Dark's decently high in my mental watchlist next time I'm in the mood for something depressing.

Probably the best working director from 1996 to 2003. He was like a demented Carl Dreyer, and almost as brilliant. Breaking the Waves is damn close to being a masterpiece. Dogville is hilarious in a really perverse way.

I don't like any of his recent stuff, though. Antichrist is just plain ugly and Melancholia is a bore.

He has talent and ideas but can't get out of his own way and his work always collapses at the end because he's interested in merely pushing buttons. Breaking the Waves is a film of faith by a guy who has none, Dogville is a film about America by a guy who doesn't understand it, and so on. He's a filmmaking pretender really, who plays the role of a great genius without the work to sustain it.

The great Lukas Moodysson was mentioned as a reference point and if you want a comparison Lilja-4-Ever is exactly the kind of movie he couldn't make. Moodysson is an artist, Von Trier a charlatan, a provocateur, which of course is fine, but he's not going to all of a sudden "get good", it all too late for that, too many years of getting fat, and too much misguided acclaim for too many years.

I think when it comes to getting performances out of his leading ladies, there is no one better working today, and probably no one better since the days of Hitchcock. Now, the Bjork accusations do shine a different sort of light on that, but most of the other actresses praised von Trier's methods, and the end results do speak to something in his directorial method. The likes of Watson, Kidman, Howard, Gainsbourg and Dunst have all given their career-best work, and in the cases of most of them (Bjork included), they rate as some of the best female performances in modern cinema. I am intrigued to see what he will do with a singular male protagonist in Matt Dillon.

When it comes to von Trier as a screenwriter, he is effective enough but his works feel far too stage-bound. This is obviously most notable in Dogville and Manderlay, but all of his screenplays have a distinct flavor to them that, while very good, also feel like they would be far more effective as stage dramas rather than in a visual medium like film. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, as they add to his style, but it's an intriguing observation nonetheless.

When it comes to a visual director, I can't stand his aesthetic. Antichrist and Melancholia have moments of pure visual loveliness, but the rest of his films are grotesque to look at sometimes. Dogville has one of my favorite scripts of the 2000s, but I despise the Brechtian minimalist aspect of the set design and direction. I wish that he had the visual flair of someone like Refn or even Vinterberg (who calmed down after his flirtation with Dogme 95 and has cranked out some pretty gorgeous films of late).