A boiling soup of images prepared by a mad chef and served to customers so hypnotised with horror (he hopes) that they drink it blindly to the last drop. That has been the critical writ, more or less, about Antichrist. When Lars von Trier, Danish maker of Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dogville, proclaimed at the Cannes press conference for his new film: “I am the best director in the world,” detractors observed that in Denmark it is a natural career progression from princeliness to insanity: see Hamlet. Trier has always been determined to make that move, here is the clinching folly.

Antichrist ★★★★☆
Lars von Trier

Skin ★★☆☆☆
Anthony Fabian

Just Another Love Story ★★☆☆☆
Ole Bornedal

The Proposal ★★☆☆☆
Anne Fletcher

Charles Dickens’s England ★★★☆☆
Julia Richards

But some follies are better than others. Some follies are worth dragging yourself through nests of hornet-like critics and mocking pietists. At the Cannes screening I was surrounded by people who snickered, tut-tutted and sighed ostentatiously as the remorseless tale of the bereavement-tormented couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, pictured) seeking self-therapy in a forest cabin chuntered on towards violence, delirium and grand guignol.

The Cannes audience laughed out loud at the end-credits dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian master of sombre mysticism. Trier is to Tarkovsky (seemed the unspoken thought) what a street thug with a switchblade is to a sage on a soapbox or a saint on a pillar.

Yes; well. Here is my opinion. Antichrist is a fairground ride through the brain of a genius, both nightmarish and apocalyptic. Trier’s head is the most dangerous place in modern cinema, its multiple caverns mysteriously structured and weirdly laid out. Here is the Wellesian Gothic chamber (Europa); here is the Brechtian Basilica (Dogville) and here is the Grotto of Utter Lunacy, enshrining musicals about capital punishment starring Björk (Dancer in the Dark). That last film’s winning of the Cannes Golden Palm in 2000 only proves there are no consensus orthodoxies in the judging of Trier, even after a career lasting nearly 30 years.

With Antichrist my advice is to bypass the counsellors of despair or derision and say yes to everything. Is the film beautiful? Yes: extraordinarily so in the tracking imagery, shot like a moving negative, through the sinister forest as the couple hike towards their cabin named, with throbbing symbolism, “Eden” (They are Adam and Eve in all but name, with frequent nakedness included). Is the film cruel? Yes, horribly but at best harrowingly: from the first sequence of the little child’s death-fall from a window as Dafoe/Gainsbourg make love, oblivious to the nascent tragedy, to the last horrors of pain, torment and death.

Is the film misogynistic? Yes, but as part of a larger distrust of humankind, amplified by the depression Trier confessedly suffered before the film’s making. No one escapes chastisement in Antichrist: neither the man who fatally combines the roles of lover and therapist, nor the woman played by Gainsbourg (deserved winner of the Cannes Best Actress prize) as a victim of gender hatred finally driven to visit on the world the witching powers attributed to her sex through history.

Is the film art? Yes, that too. There is power and savage insight in the story of this couple’s self-ruin, placed in a monstering Gothic acoustic out of Strindberg by Bosch. You cannot address the enormities of Antichrist with the bijou tools of everyday criticism. Trier goes further, in speaking of the unspeakable, than almost any other modern film maker. When he seems in danger of falling over the edge, it is not our job to mock and watch him but to run and catch him; to save him so he can approach another life-endangering extremity on our behalves in his next film.

Keenly cute: Sandra Bullock in ‘The Proposal’

There are no extremes in Skin. If only. Director Anthony Fabian turns the true story of South African apartheid victim Sandra Laing into a film as pallid as a problem-of-the-week television movie. As the dark-skinned child of white Afrikaaners (Sam Neill, Alice Krige), Sandra (Sophie Okonedo) paid for her genetic incongruity with rejection by both white and black communities. Fleeing a bigoted father and weak mother, she settled with a black husband, but that too came to grief. Saved by liberation in 1994, she became a marked woman for the biopic industry. One is amazed Lord Attenborough did not rush in with bromides blazing. Instead we get this dull, stiltedly scripted potter through re-warmed liberal indignation and heart-on-sleeve emotion.

The Danish thriller Just Another Love Story, directed by Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch), has a style like play-school Ingmar Bergman. Angst-ridden close-ups in garish colours; fractured editing; everything ostentatiously anguished while simultaneously aiming at the arcanely teasing. The work-worn cop (Anders W. Berthelsen) falls for the beautiful maimed amnesiac (Rebecka Hemse), posing as her missing-presumed-dead ex-lover as he holds vigil by her hospital bed. What is happening to his day job (we ask)? Who is the sinister wheelchair case wrapped in head-to-toe bandages? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; but Lars von Trier deals with the psycho-spiritual putrefactions of that land more convincingly than Bornedal.

The Disney romantic comedy The Proposal is so keen to be cute it curdles our stomachs and so anxious to be funny it jellifies our funny bones. New York book editor Sandra Bullock, a Canadian outstaying her work visa, bullies and bribes assistant Ryan Reynolds into pledging himself to a paper wedding. That way she saves her job and he gets a promotion. The main plot development becomes a meet-his-parents trip to Alaska. There everyone overacts – though Reynolds, good at subtle abashment, is better than Miss Congealed Hilarity – as if a single whiff of Sarah Palin country has activated the glee club grins, the “funny” wildlife vignettes and the shotgun wedding of joie de vivre and vehemently robust heterosexuality.

Thank goodness for Charles Dickens’s England. This combination of documentary of literary travelogue has no pretensions at all, merely a mad, endearing, Dickensian innocence. Imagine a descendant of the Cheeryble brothers, played by the film’s tour-guide Sir Derek Jacobi, deciding to show us round every house in Britain associated with the novelist. Sometimes a startled owner opens his door to the bouffant, declamatory actor: “Are you surprised to see me?” trills the histrio. At other times, Sir Derek hovers, expatiates or reads aloud in mid-street. At others still, he runs out of things to say while the camera, slow to realise, runs on. Unpolished and dazzlingly un-self-aware, the film could have been made at any time during the past 100 years, though an expert uninformed of its modernity would probably date it at around 1950.