Nymph()maniac: Volume 2

Simply, the second half of the film, which by the way lasts two hours, is even more tedious and boring than the first part, and it has a strange ending, a strange overall culmination, which will leave you feeling like you missed something. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about this double film. It's not badly directed, but at the same time, it doesn't give the viewer much either. The pseudo controversies are sometimes apparent, but it's part of the film and the subject matter. It's just long and actually quite empty. (05/07/2014)

My enthusiasm from the first Nymphomaniac can be summed up with the fact that I didn’t run to the cinema for the second part and waited for it without much interest for four months. And with similar lack of interest I spent two hours watching it, during which I looked at my watch more often that it would be healthy. There is something there, of course, Trier doesn’t make stupid empty stuff, and the climax is quite vibrant, but this time, the rules of his game didn’t work on me. (04/12/2014)

The first two-thirds of the second Nymphomaniac retain the power of the first film and, with the sadistic “Mr. K”, increases the audience’s discomfort to risky heights. But the final, “criminal” third raises the suspicion that Lars von Trier either didn’t know how to appropriately and meaningfully finish his work or he was overruled by the producers, who aimed for the biggest box-office profits possible (the absence of Shia LaBeouf in the role of Jerome, while all the others actors reprised their roles, suggests that the last third was filmed as an afterthought, after his contract expired). Finally, the last scene of the film is a bad joke, a slap with a glove full of coins that Nymphomaniac earned also by being split into two parts. In said scene, Trier completely (and unnecessarily) destroyed Stellan Skarsgård’s Seligman, a very important character for the story. (01/16/2014)

(Volume I)… which settles down a bit in the second half, when the forced overlaps disappear, and the director returns to his favorite theme of "woman as evil incarnate." This makes the film less long-winded but then comes Bond, 3+5, and golden rain, and the awkward impressions are broken even more than in Melancholia; please shrink the Director's Cut to two hours and without the asexual sex, though that's not really the point here (unexpectedly, right?). (04/04/2014)

After five and a half hours spent with the reruns of both parts, I rank Nymph()maniac: Volume 2 as one of my favorite film experiences. It really is a very entertaining idyll. The alternation of actors in the same roles makes me feel like I’m watching Buñuel, but it's not only in this respect that he is similar to von Trier. Both of them are just making fun of everyone and everything, and I like that. I wasn't pleased at first with the different genre of the second part, compared to the very freewheeling beginning, but the Director's Cut puts this negation entirely behind it. There is up to an hour of new material to see, and this logically provides a new perspective on both the whole and the second half of this black-humored affair. The seemingly strange ideas and messages from the abridged version gain their natural argumentation and their logical place in the plot. I especially appreciate the storyline about abortion, which completes the character of Joe in a brilliant way. On the other hand, I was hoping for more of the new Fido chapter, but apparently, even Lars didn't want to go there anymore. That’s too bad. (07/05/2014)