Critics reviews

Emotionally and intellectually, the movie never quite delivers on its promise, and the frequent views of the boom, the shadow of the camera crew and so forth are irritating distractions (manifesto or not, this is not 'pure' cinema), but it is consistently intriguing, involving, and finally quite unlike anything else.

[N]ever forget: if a family member or a coworker doesn’t love your inner idiot, they simply don’t love you.

"The Idiots" is like a controlled social experiment, both in its subject matter and its filmmaking technique... However offensive or intentionally clumsy, its influence cannot easily be denied.

But the group and the film don't seem to have any real ideology; instead, both appear concerned primarily with evoking a visceral response from their audiences. "The Idiots" fails even at that: As much as it would like to incite and infuriate, it primarily inspires boredom, a condition only intensified by poor pacing, near-constant tonal incongruities, and a bloated running time.

There’s no getting around that many audiences will be offended by such behavior, but the group’s intent is not to insult those physically or mentally challenged in any manner of degree but, rather, to disturb middle-class types as much as they possibly can.

By turns unpleasant and watchable - or maybe, watchable because it's unpleasant - "The Idiots," which was greeted with take-cover shock at Cannes... demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

"The Idiots” is a raw, funny, maddening ramble. Von Trier seeks catharsis by pushing everything to extremes... Von Trier may be a bit of a fruitcake, but at least he means what he does.

Unfortunately "The Idiots," shot in smeary, hand-held digital video, has nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience, the achievement of which it holds up as a brave political accomplishment.

One has the impression that the director has sought to defy and disrupt what he regards as bourgeois norms of behaviour and probity (and bourgeois ways of filmmaking) in the most provocative way possible. The result is messy and confused.

Lars von Trier's is a strange film. Not just self-applaudingly offbeat, like a lot of current cinema, but truly disturbing.

I conceived the suspicion that The Idiots didn't know what it wanted, and that having been devised through laborious improvisation, there was a fatal lack of coherence.

Always one to site extremes in disconcerting proximity, in "The Idiots" von Trier juxtaposes a sensitive humanism with an all-out, iconoclastic sarcasm, and the resulting hysteria seems to make the Dogma rules work in the way they may have been intended - to bring the movie closer to the viewer.