4. Dogville (2003)
Dogville comes to us courtesy of one Lars Von Trier, a director with one quality inherent to all his films: they're difficult to digest. That's true of Dogville, anyway, a strange and brilliantly experimental movie that Von Trier decided would work better on a sound stage, void of convention sets or location shooting - instead of buildings, we just get lines marked out on a black floor. John Hurt narrates the action, which concerns a young woman named Grace (played by Nicole Kidman), who is taken in by the small town of the movie's title when she turns up one day. Von Trier's movie tackles lots of bold ideas, some of which are lost in the conceit of the movie's scarce stylings, but for the most part it's an interesting, if not overlong, take on narrative minimalism, as Grace is used and abused by a town that seemed so normal on the surface for the sum of its runtime - Von Trier looks to explore the dangerous mentality of "the community." And then, in its ending, Dogville ascends to greatness: we learn Grace was the daughter of a powerful gangster (she ran away as she despised his profession), and - having been broken by the community - orders him to wipe Dogville from the face of the Earth. Which he does, by machine-gunning everybody down in a horrific finale. Grace's original innocence has been replaced with unabashed resentment, and she's driven to murder, having been corrupted by... well, the corrupted.