Nymphomaniac
A promiscuous woman details her sexual adventures.
Directed by Lars von Trier
(Not rated)
***
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Let the arguments begin about this sexually graphic and “bounteously clever” film, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). A story about sex addiction that runs in two parts across four hours, it’ll leave viewers fighting over whether bad-boy director Lars von Trier thinks sex is an eternal mystery or a cosmic joke spun at our expense. Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as the title character, a woman named Joe who recounts her adventurous sexual history to explain how she ended up in an alley bloodied and bruised. It’s an intriguing character study, said Amy Nicholson in LA Weekly, though the sex isn’t erotic, and Joe never explains why she has sex with up to 10 men a day, other than her “cynical line that love is ‘just lust with jealousy added.’” The film is rich with novelistic detail, but Joe herself remains a one-dimensional cipher, said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. In his provocative but labored attempt to answer Freud’s question, “What does a woman want?” von Trier has created a woman with no apparent goals or interests beyond endless sexual encounters.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Political cartoons for October 21
Cartoons Tuesday’s political cartoons include a high-profile theft, Epstein files keeping Donald Trump up at night, Halloween costumes and scary GOP stories
-
Five things we learnt from Virginia Giuffre’s memoir
The Explainer Nobody’s Girl recounts ‘harrowing’ details of Giuffre’s suffering as a teenage victim of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle
-
Prince Andrew: a timeline of disgraced royal’s Epstein scandal
In Depth How the Queen’s favourite child went from Falklands War hero to public pariah