20 Most Controversial Movies Since 2000

7. Nymphomaniac

If you had to pick a director currently working who deliberately goes out of his way to provoke audiences, Lars Von Trier would be as good a choice as any. From his early movies such as The Idiots, which caused great offense for many with its depiction of a group of adults who go around pretending to be mentally handicapped, Von Triers has established himself as the enfant terrible of the international and art house scene.

His latest movie, Nymphomaniac, is clearly no exception, as the title alone implies. Split into two parts and running at four hours long, it revolves around Zoe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a woman addicted to sex who is taken back to the apartment of a kindly bachelor (Stellan Skarsgaard) after he discovers her beaten in an alleyway, where she recounts her sexual life in all its juicy - and often sordid - detail. Von Triers' interesting method of deconstructing sexual desires by comparisons to fly fishing and the music of Bach makes for a fascinating approach to the subject of nymphomania, but no amount of cleverness disguised the graphic on-screen sex, and the film was unable to avoid the NC-17 rating - not surprising, then, that the studio chose instead to release the film unrated.