"Director: Lars von Trier"

• Manderlay | DVD | (30/04/2007) from £4.44   |  Saving you £1.55 (34.91%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Manderlay is a plantation in 1933 Alabama whose residents live as though slavery hadn't been abolished 70 years earlier.

• Five Obstructions | DVD | (20/09/2004) from £8.45   |  Saving you £12.80 (178.03%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Once upon a time--1967, to be precise--Danish director Jørgen Leth released The Perfect Human. In The Five Obstructions, fellow countryman Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) challenges his "hero" to remake the short five times and provides a different set of "obstructions" for each. Because Leth likes cigars, von Trier suggests the first be made in Cuba. For the second, however, he sends Leth to "the worst place on earth"--Bombay's red light district. The obstructions keep coming, interspersed with conversation and clips from the original film, in which actors engage in a variety of activities, like eating and dancing, while the narrator posits oblique questions like "Why is joy so whimsical?" (Von Trier claims to have watched it "at least 20 times.") In the end, the two Danes have whipped up an unclassifiable concoction that plays less like documentary and more like a duel between friendly adversaries. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

• Dancer In The Dark | DVD | (12/08/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Winner of the Palme d'Ore at Cannes, this new film from Dogma 95 director Lars Von Trier is a bizarre musical starring off-the-wall pop star Bjork.

• Manderlay / Dogville | DVD | (03/07/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Dogville (2003): The Beautiful fugitive Grace (Kidman) arrives in the isolated township of Dogville pleading that she is on the run from a team of gangsters and desperately needs help. The kindly Tom (Bettany) a self-appointed town spokesman encourages the little community to hide her and in return Grace agrees to work for them. Initial suspicion turns to trust as the townsfolk realise that they need her. Grace and Tom form a relationship. However when a search for Grace

• Europa | DVD | (29/07/2002) from £17.99   |  Saving you £2.00 (11.12%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The unquiet twin spirits of Fritz Lang and Franz Kafka preside over Europa, Lars von Trier's sardonic, saturnine vision of just-post-WWII Germany. In 1945 Leo Kessler, a young American of German descent, returns to the shattered land of his forebears to help in its reconstruction. Through his uncle, who works for the huge railway network Zentropa, he gets a job as a trainee sleeping-car conductor and also meets the seductive Katharina Hartmann, daughter of Zentropa's owner Max. But acts of sabotage and murder are being planned by unregenerate young Nazis calling themselves Werewolves, and very soon Leo's hapless innocent abroad starts finding out that, in this time and place of shifting loyalties, nothing and no one are what they seem. As if to accentuate this mood of nervous ambiguity, von Trier constantly switches from black and white to colour, and from English to (subtitled) German dialogue, often right in the middle of a scene. The cast boasts several iconic figures of European cinema, including Barbara Sukowa (a Fassbinder favourite) as femme fatale Katharina, and Eddie Constantine (from Godard's Alphaville) as a manipulative American colonel, while a literally hypnotic voice-over is spoken by the great Bergman actor Max von Sydow. There's more than a hint that von Trier intends a mischievous side-glance at today's Europe, and today's European film industry, in resentful thrall to the might of Hollywood. And while Europa is gripping and richly atmospheric, it's never without humour. The long, final episode is a tour de force of tragicomedy, with poor Leo juggling the competing demands of love and loyalty, life and death, while being harassed by his uncle who, horrified that Leo has lost his official peaked cap, forces him to wear a knotted handkerchief on his head, as well as by a pair of punctilious railroad inspectors demanding to know how long it takes him to make up a sleeping-car bunk. Lang and Kafka, sure, but maybe a touch of the Marx Brothers, too. --Philip Kemp

• The Boss Of It All | DVD | (08/04/2013) from £8.13   |  Saving you £7.86 (96.68%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Black comedy from acclaimed director Lars von Trier. Jens Albinus plays the boss of an IT company who, on the firm's startup, invents a fake CEO to take the flak when potential employee problems threaten to raise their head. Everything rolls along nicely, until the time when he decides that he wants to sell the business. With negotiations about to begin, the prospective new owners insist on dealing with the CEO face-to-face, causing a major headache for the 'real' owner. With time running out, he decides to follow the old adage of 'in for a penny, in for a pound', and sets about hiring an out of work actor in a desperate attempt to pull off the deception.

• The Lars von Trier Collection (5 Disc DVD) | DVD | (08/12/2014) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  One of the most bold, daring, controversial and iconoclastic directors of our time, Lars von Trier has secured himself a place among the great auteurs of contemporary cinema. This box set brings together four of his most recent works - Nymphomaniac Vol. I & Vol. II, Melancholia, Antichrist and Breaking the Waves.

• The Lars von Trier Collection (5 Disc Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (08/12/2014) from £39.99   |  Saving you £20.00 (50.01%)   |  RRP £59.99

  One of the most bold, daring, controversial and iconoclastic directors of our time, Lars von Trier has secured himself a place among the great auteurs of contemporary cinema. This box set brings together four of his most recent works - Nymphomaniac Vol. I & Vol. II, Melancholia, Antichrist and Breaking the Waves.

• Five Obstructions | DVD | (26/04/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Five Obstructions

• The Idiots | DVD | (28/01/2013) from £22.98   |  Saving you £-7.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  From Lars von Trier the controversial director of Breaking the Waves comes a strikingly original and thought-provoking film about a group of people who confront and subvert the norms and conventions of middle-class society by exploring and releasing their 'inner idiot'. Following a chance encounter with the group lonely drifter Karen becomes unintentionally involved with them. Gradually Karen begins to understand what they are up to and overcoming initial anger and reluctance eventually participates in their subversive activities. Isolated and concealing a deep sadness Karen finds solace acceptance and understanding with 'the idiots' and she is drawn in by the sense of joy and child-like innocence of their behaviour. However as the idiocy escalates certain members decide to leave strengthening the solidarity of those who remain and furthering their resolve to live out their excessive feelings; the aggression the curiosity and the uncontrolled egotistical primitive sexuality. Produced with the revolutionary Dogma 95 Manifesto The Idiots is a powerful controversial and refreshingly unconventional film from one of contemporary cinema's major talents.

• Manderlay | DVD | (03/07/2006) from £9.98   |  Saving you £10.01 (100.30%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Manderlay is a plantation in 1933 Alabama whose residents live as though slavery hadn't been abolished 70 years earlier.

• The Element Of Crime | DVD | (29/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Way, way before he dreamt up his famous Dogme manifesto, Lars von Trier launched his feature-film career with The Element of Crime and proved that, 400 years after Hamlet, the Danes can still do melancholy like nobody else. Less a film noir than a film jaune sale, this ultra-enigmatic thriller is shot entirely in tones of grimy sepia in a world where nightfall seems to be an unceasing condition. A police detective, Fisher (Michael Elphick), is summoned from Cairo to "Europe" (the location never gets any more specific than that) to investigate a series of gory child-murders. He comes to suspect that the killer may be a mysterious character called Harry Grey and sets out to retrace Grey's movements. The film takes its title from a treatise written by Fisher's old mentor Osborne (Welsh actor Esmond Knight, a veteran of Powell and Pressburger's films), but it might as well refer to water. Von Trier conjures up a world not only permanently benighted, but dank, sodden and dripping both indoors and out, cluttered with mouldy, antiquated industrial machinery. There are echoes (or pre-echoes) here of half-a-dozen other movies--Blade Runner, City of Lost Children, Tarkovsky's Stalker, Welles' The Trial--and at times it feels as though von Trier has just set out to show he can do art house as well as anybody and possibly better. The plot makes no sense whatever and clearly isn't meant to, and Elphick's bemused expression, one suspects, derives from the actor as much as from the character he's playing. As always with von Trier you can't help wondering if whole thing isn't an elaborate put-on, especially since the director himself shows up, epicene and shaven-headed, playing a personage called "Schmuck of Ages". But what it lacks in coherence (either narrative or visual) Element of Crime makes up for in atmosphere, which it has, literally, by the bucketful. This release, incidentally, is the English-language version. --Philip Kemp

• The Kingdom | DVD | (27/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Acclaimed director Lars Von Trier delves into the world of the supernatural. At The Kingdom Denmark's most technologically advanced hospital a number of otherworldly and uncanny events begin to occur much to the dismay of its doctors and patients... Contains both the original series and the follow-up.

• The Boss of it All | DVD | (23/06/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  An IT company hires an actor (Jens Albinus) to serve as the company's president in order to help the business get sold to a cranky Icelander (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson).