Dancer is like no other movie around. Shot in bleached-out video colors in rough, hand-held style, the film is at once aggressively modern and deliberately, melodramatically, old-fashioned.

The situations that writer-director Lars von Trier serves up here might be embarrassingly florid, but the coupling of his manipulative skills and Björk's showy intensity results in a movie with the force of an emotional bulldozer.

At least Dancer in the Dark is bad in a complicated way.

Dancer in the Dark critiques the relentless optimism of mid-century movie musicals, but it also puts the American cultural narrative under the microscope.