Id-Tripping: "Antichrist," "Where the Wild Things Are," "Amelia," "New York, I Love You"

Lars von Trier needs a hug. Everybody’s favorite Nordic goofball has described his new cine-taunt, Antichrist, as a depression-therapy movie, which explains why so much of it plays like a slideshow of Rorschach blots. No explanation, however, is given for the prologue, which, except for a few seconds of close-up hardcore humping, plays like a perfume/jeans/shampoo ad by Ridley Scott. A nameless couple (Willem Dafoe as "He," Charlotte Gainsbourg as "She") fucks vigorously in immaculate, black-and-white compositions while their infant son toddles out of his crib and, to the lachrymose trilling of a Handel aria, oh-so-prettily plunges out the window. The wackiness is just beginning. Consumed by guilt and struggling to survive agonizing despair, they quite logically retreat to the creepiest cabin in the creepiest forest since Evil Dead. Way before they reach the woods, von Trier is already piling ominous effect on ominous effect: Patches of quivering skin, a groaning, squeaking soundtrack, a slow zoom that finds primordial slime in a vase of flowers. Dafoe is a pompous psychiatrist (Patronizing Male Reason), Gainsbourg is a trembling scholar of the occult (Malignant Female Impulse), both are alone with their fears in what the increasingly bonkers wife calls "Satan’s church." Didn’t I just see this crap in Paranormal Activity? Von Trier’s Eden is darkly enchanted, an expressionistic garden where people turn into verdure, CGI critters warn of doom, and the road to deliverance is paved with mutilations apparently guest-directed by Eli Roth. After the director’s suffering maidens in Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, Gainsbourg’s toolbox succubus is something of a relief. "A crying woman is a scheming woman," she tells Dafoe, who by then has ejaculated blood, had a stone wheel screwed onto his leg, and been nearly stabbed with a shovel.

As soon as I saw the words "grief," "pain" and "despair" engraved in the swan-diving cherub’s tin soldiers, I knew it was just a matter of time before Dafoe was doing a double-take at a talking fox. Antichrist is that kind of movie. "Chaos reigns"? If only. Von Trier may have set out to make a purely intuitive piece, but he’s too convinced of his own genius to let himself work instinctively. There’s no mystery -- supposedly cathartic shocks are calculated and schematic, undigested neuroses and articulated morbidity are offered as the Human Condition, the marks are stenciled as fussily as in Dogville’s bare stage. Is von Trier, like Andrew Sarris once said of Billy Wilder, too cynical to believe in his own cynicism? Still, his witches' brew of Brueghel, Nemerov ("The Remorse for Time"), Hour of the Wolf and Friday the 13th isn’t without charm. Its visual expressiveness never flags, and Gainsbourg and Dafoe imbue their characters’ risible danse macabre with visceral urgency. And it is -- there’s no other word for it -- a hoot. Von Trier is an intellectual nitwit, but he’s also a top sardonic gagman covering every picture with an inch-thick absurdist veneer. The jokes come fast and furious. The "fear pyramid" diagram. Gainsbourg cheerily declaring herself cured, then shooting the befuddled Dafoe a why-can’t-you-ever-be-happy-for-me glare. The acorns. The grotesquely wounded husband pausing to contemplate cartoon stars ("That’s not a real constellation"). And you have to admire the chutzpah of a director who, repeatedly accused of misogyny, responds by bringing in... medieval misogyny. Are the shambling, faceless crowds at the end Lars’ critics or his fans? One fine prankster deserves another: Some intrepid projectionist should put Antichrist on a double-bill with Couples Retreat, if only to prove that it has more laughs.

Better yet, put it on a double-bill with Where the Wild Things Are to prove that it has better creatures. While von Trier has only a fox, a deer and a raven, Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book (a different kind of Freudian-id voyage) has a full stable of beasts. They’re shaggy behemoths that, thanks to the film’s mix of computer animation and old-school puppetry, possess unusual heft on the screen as they share space with the nine-year-old protagonist, Max (Max Records). Trouble is, they’re all militantly dreary, like a Prozac-starved version of the seven dwarfs. (There’s Lugubrious, Needy, Fretful, Disconsolate, Remorseful...) Before becoming their king, however, young Max stomps around the real world, building snow forts and throwing tantrums when they’re destroyed. In one of Jonze’s and co-writer Dave Eggers’ trite expansions of Sendak’s slender narrative, the boy is revealed as the fruit of a fractured family, with dad out of the picture and mom (Catherine Keener) a loving but fatigued figure feeling the economic crunch. Sent to bed after particularly foul behavior, Max instead hops a boat and finds himself in an island inhabited by dismal rejects from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Despite their looming size, the beasts are pipsqueaks lumbering through a beige-colored, often torch-lit world, captured by Jonze’s irritatingly hand-held camera. (James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forrest Whitaker, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose, and Chris Cooper provide the dopey vocals.) In Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Jonze’s Jackass whimsy benefited from the morbidity of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays. By himself (or, worse, tied to a fellow syrup-pourer like Eggers), he joins the treehouse where Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry and Sofia Coppola hide, watch Truffaut, listen to Karen O and sniff their own fingers. "When you go home," one puppet oozes, "will you say good things about us?" I know at least one person who won't.

Amelia Earhart was like a real-life Katharine Hepburn character, something proto-feminist auteur Dorothy Arzner understood when she cast the high-strung actress in 1933’s Christopher Strong. Amy Adams also understood it when she played the legendary aviatrix as a Bringing Up Baby kook in last summer’s Night at the Museum sequel; it’s a shame Hilary Swank instead plays her as the sanctimonious, late-period Hepburn of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in Mira Nair’s Amelia. Rangy, slim-hipped and iron-jawed, Swank looks like Earhart, but she’s not so much playing a woman as embodying a recycle bin of Oscar-craving pieties, earnestly strolling through cardboard period re-creations and humorlessly dispensing feistiness. The doomed 1937 globe-trotting flight frames the story, with flashbacks penciling in her early days as a Kansas tomboy, her historic, Pacific Ocean-crossing tour, and her relationships with agent-husband George Putnam (Richard Gere) and dashing aviation entrepreneur Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor). Solemnity kills Nair’s customary gusto; with a startling lack of curiosity, her hagiography simplifies Earhart’s aeronautical passion ("Flying lets me move in three dimensions") while ironing out all but hints of her bisexuality ("I may have at one point..."). Not even the "at least the flying stuff was cool" relief that’s been around since Wings and Hell’s Angels applies here -- the flight sequences, with their cloudy dissolves and glimpses of exotic lands (Amelia points to the animals roaming the orange grounds below: "Those are oryx!"), induce sleepiness rather than vertigo. Cherry Jones’s twinkly cameo as Eleanor Roosevelt and a campy bit involving Vidal’s little son Gore (yup, that Gore) and scary tigers-and-jungles wallpaper provide a bit of a break, but Amelia remains smotheringly conventional. No biography this neutered should have its heroine ask in voiceover, "Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?"

Nair is one of the ten directors corralled for New York, I Love You, the Big Apple-set follow-up to that Paris, Je T’aime omnibus flick from a couple of years back. Her segment, with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic diamond buyer haggling with a Jain jeweler (Irrfan Khan), sets the template: Maudlin cutesiness doled out in duets. There isn’t much to say about a ragbag of shorts in which Brett freakin’ Ratner comes off best by simply telling a dirty joke (James Caan gets Anton Yelchin to take wheelchair-bound Olivia Thirlby to the prom) and exiting left. Other episodes of varying degrees of dreadfulness include Allen Hughes’ impressionistic subway ride with Drea de Matteo, Fatih Akin’s limp ode to Shu Qi (Hou Hsiao-hsien has nothing to worry about), Joshua Marston’s crabby vaudeville turn with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman, and Shunji Iwai’s pitiable attempt to make Orlando Bloom look like a driven artist. Yvan Attal gets two episodes about pick-up lines and role-playing, with Ethan Hawke hitting on Maggie Q. and Robin Wright waxing lyrical to Chris Cooper about "the little moments on the sidewalk" that the city is supposedly brimming with. And let's not even go into Shekhar Kapur’s short with Julie Christie, Shia LaBeouf and John Hurt, the misconceived chunk of fancifulness that caps what should have been called New York, I Sorta Kinda Like You but Only as a Friend, Okay.