Daily Archives: February 8, 2026

“Sad!”: Why I Won’t Watch Antichrist

My contribution to the 2019 anthology Unwatchable, published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen. — J.R

My refusal to watch Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), even after Criterion   generously sent me a review copy, isn’t a position I arrived at suddenly or lightly. Even though the film premiered the year after I retired as a weekly reviewer, thus obviating any possible professional obligation, my decision wasn’t only based on the near-certainty that I would hate it — which, after all, hadn’t prevented me from twitching all the way through The Passion of the Christ five years earlier. Nor was it founded on any conviction that von Trier is devoid of talent, a conviction I don’t have.


antichrist-movie_poster

Trying retroactively to account for my steadfast refusal to see the film, arrived at eight years ago, I can only take the blatantly ahistorical, illogical, and quintessentially Trieresque tack of citing a remark of his quoted in the Guardian only six months ago. It concerns his latest project (I won’t assist his ad campaign by mentioning the title) — a feature about a serial killer (natch) that takes the serial killer’s viewpoint (ditto). It’s a film, he says, that “celebrates the idea that the life is evil and soulless, which is sadly proven by the recent rise of the Homo trumpus —the rat king. Read more

The Cinema of Tomorrow (2007)

This is the first of my bimonthly columns written for Cahiers du Cinéma España, which ran in their first issue (May 2007). Not coincidentally, it was at the same Mar del Plata festival described below that the magazine’s director, Carlos F. Heredero, and its editor-in-chief, Carlos Reviergo, invited me to write this regular column. — J.R.

My seven trips to Argentina over the past eight years began when the Buenos Aires branch of FIPRESCI, the international film critics organization, brought me there to give some lectures in the fall of 2000. The couple who became my host and hostess, critics Quintín and Flavia de la Fuentes, invited me back half a year later after Quintín became director of the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film, a remarkable event sponsored by the city every April. Quintín held the job for four years, and it quickly became, to my knowledge, the only festival to be organized socially as well as intellectually around the principles of film criticism. The programming gave as much attention to older films (especially difficult-to-see classics imported from the Cinémathèque Française by Bernard Benoliel, such as Rossellini’s sublime India) as to new ones, and the books they published, starting with a translation of my own Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See, tended to be polemical interventions. Read more