Lars and the Bleak Girl: "Melancholia" (2011)

In what could be perceived as the conclusion (or perhaps bridge) to Danish provocateur Lars von Trier's recent explorations of guilt and depression - beginning with 2009's much ballyhooed horror film "Antichrist" - the director's latest film, the apocalyptically beautiful "Melancholia" is as relatively restrained as a film about the end of the world (and coming from the self-proclaimed "greatest director in the world") could be.
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Which isn't to say that fans of the lurid extremes of "Antichrist" won't have anything to feast their eyes on here (in fact, they don't even have to wait past the title card as they're witness to a  balletic slow-motion prologue set to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" that perhaps outdoes anything the fearless von Trier has attempted before), but the kind of film that "Melancholia" is - a doleful, numbing meditation on recessive despondency, allegorically linked to the end of the world - will likely provoke less revulsion and more quizzical agitation. Unless, that is, you're like me, in which case the film will play like a cosmic revelation.
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Split into two parts separated by inter-titles (each a name of the two sisters), the first introduces Justine (played brilliantly by a morose-then-despondent Kirsten Dunst) a bride on her way to her own wedding reception, which quickly snowballs into a disaster, full of bluntly cynical dinner speeches, a bickering father-of-the-groom and, most importantly, a terribly disinterested bride. 
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Part two (easily the more bleakly entertaining and satisfyingly resolute of the two) is titled "Claire," the comparatively chipper of the two sisters (played by Charlotte Gainsbourgh) who frantically, obsessively, fears that the fictional planet (metaphorically called "Melancholia"), scientifically expected to merely pass by the Earth rather than collide with it, is nevertheless about to demolish all life on Earth. 
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Von Trier was initially interested in the concept of clinically depressive people behaving normally in a time of crisis, and Dunst's fixed detachment, her deadpan death wish throughout the second half serves as his portal into this morbid curiosity. 
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Of course, even the most ignorant of viewers could suspect the film's conclusion - a sonic wave of deep bass and Wagner strings that flood the auditorium in an example of a film that still justifies the trip to the theatre - an all too rare example, perhaps. [A]