20 Great Films That You’ll Only Want To Watch Once

18) Melancholia

Danish film auteur Lars von Trier continues to vie for our attention by making arthouse films about fragile, masochistic women. If 2009’s punishingly pompous Antichrist was his horror film, and an angry, arrogant reaction from the director’s publicized depression, then Melancholia is his sci-fi disaster movie and hopefully results in no relapse of a mental breakdown. This one has no slicing of female genitalia, but it’s as visually mesmerizing and emotionally hopeless as the end of days could be.

What with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, it seems the most ambitious of filmmakers had a mutual epiphany: play a family drama against cosmic events. Casting a spell with an otherworldly beauty and sprawling vision, von Trier’s Melancholia is a beautifully profound meditation on depression and human existence. This proves von Trier has finally found a soul and a point in himself as a filmmaker. This time, depression has brought out the best in him, but now Mr. von Trier, take your Lexapro.