This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The fact that "The Boss of it All" is a strange film isn't unusual given it was directed by Lars von Trier. He's known for making unusual films and prides himself for his adherence to the posits of the so-called 'Dogma 95' film movement--one that makes many demands for its films, such as the story being placed in the present, the use of natural settings and the frequent use of hand-held cameras (among other things). The film begins unusually--with a narrator acknowledging that this is a film and making comments about the story and cinematography! It also ends in pretty much the same way and even has a point in the middle where more comments are made (presumably by von Trier). The story is about a very deceptive man. While Ravn appears to be a nice guy and his co-workers love him because he's 'like a cuddly bear', this is only a persona he puts on himself. Actually, he's a cutthroat businessman. Everyone thinks he's just a co-worker but he actually owns the company and has maneuvered everyone to sink their saving and energy into the company. But he's actually planning on selling his company to a group of Icelandic businessmen who HATE Danes and plan on firing everyone and making Ravn rich....and leaving his employees out in the cold with nothing! So how does he do this? He has created a fake boss--an absentee boss. But the folks who want to buy the company ALSO think there is such a boss. And, to finalize the deal, he needs to create a fake boss--a hatchet man who can sign off on the deal AND be blamed for everyone losing their jobs. To do this, he hires an out of work actor...but somehow his plan doesn't go as planned!Believe it or not, this movie reminds me of an episode of "Cheers" that debuted long before this movie. In it, Norm owned a painting company and none of his workers worked hard or had any respect for working-- so he created an alter-ego, Anton Keitzer, who was a nasty monster and intimidated the workers into doing their jobs! It's a funny idea and it works just fine in the film. While it is funny, it's not hilarious however and I have the feeling it could have been funnier-- particularly if von Trier had made the film in a more conventional style. Still, it's well worth seeing.

Wonderfully judged, dry-as-a-bone comedy from Lars Von Trier. A likeably eccentric bunch of desk jockeys are led by an excellent central performance from Jens Albinus (Dancer in the Dark, The Idiots), with strong support from Peter Gantzler (Smilla's Feeling For Snow); Iben Hjejle (High Fidelity) and Sofie Gråbøl (her from in the jumper from The Killing). The story is satisfyingly complex and suitably farcical, and there are touches of simple genius throughout, from nicely timed chapter headings in the form of Von Trier's sardonic narration, to the 'careless' editing that keeps the film grounded in 'reality'. Albinus has a lovely comic touch, but LVT is the star, more comedy please, Herr Von Trier!

Lars Von Trier's film, The Boss of It All (2006), is a successfully executed black comedy. The plot of the film revolves around an unemployed actor, Kristoffer, brilliantly played by Jens Albinus. The owner of an IT company, Ravn (Peter Gantzler), has told his employers of a fictitious character who is the 'boss of it all' in order to divert any unpopular decisions made by him. When a potential buyer of his company wants to meet the owner of the company in person, Ravn subsequently hires Kristoffer to act as the boss of Ravn's company. Kristoffer attempts to take on the 'boss of it all' persona in a serious manner, yet he is exposed to the audience as clueless and at times, idiotic. This provides much of the humour throughout the film where Kristoffer is so drawn in by the character, that he and 'the boss of it all' have become one and the same. As the story unfolds, the lies build and gather, one after the other, delving Kristoffer deeper and deeper into the continuous lies put forward by Ravn.Writer-director, Von Trier, makes use of terrific dialogue through his actors. The whole cast gel together well and the way Albinus seamlessly becomes more drawn in by the charade makes for great entertainment. This film demonstrates a great example of how black comedy should be produced. The Coen Brothers surely must have taken some inspiration from Von Trier for their black comedy, Burn After Reading. Both films illustrate how something so stupid and unnecessary, snowballing into something taken seriously, can create such great humour. The dull visuals and chopped up cutting, effectively enhanced the mood of the film, creating a greater sense of reality and allowing the film to not be taken so seriously. The Boss of It All is genuinely hilarious, efficiently shot and well put together black-comedic film.

Try this. Let's imagine you really want to see a movie. Maybe this one. Nothing wrong with that. But maybe it's also your turn to do some cleaning - you can't remember - but why risk argument or ill-feeling? You decide it was my idea to see the film together. It would be rude to refuse. You're a nice person after all.The owner of a Danish IT company wants to sell up. There is only one problem. When he started the company he invented an imaginary boss to take the rap for unpopular decisions. So no-one has ever met the 'boss of it all' until now. The Icelanders doing the buying insist on dealing with the actual boss. So he hires an actor.The actor, Kristoffer or 'Svend E' knows nothing about the company and finds the buyers are not the only ones he has to bluff convincingly. Over the years, he has 'sent' emails to the staff who start holding him responsible for what he has said - and of course he does not know what he's meant to have said. Ravn, the real owner, can't remember but there was some serious stuff going down. A hilarious screwball comedy, The Boss of It All also poses provocative moral dilemmas about how a boss can use fictions to mistreat workers.Even as a comedy, the film works on several levels. It starts with a basic comedy structure where we know something most of the characters don't. Kristoffer is the butt of the jokes but we want him to win. We want him to guess what he has supposed to have said and somehow turn it to his advantage. All this provides belly laughs at a gut level. Especially when he is accused of 'lousy acting' by a woman who does not know he is acting and means something else, or when he 'has' to have raunchy sex with her. (Even the sex scenes are convincingly real, even while they are excruciatingly funny.)For fans of von Trier's work, there are more subtle jokes. At the start, we hear von Trier's (uncredited) voice-over pointing out we can just about see his (physical) reflection. But the film, he says, is not worth a moment's reflection as it's comedy. It's as if someone had said, "Whatever you do, don't think of 'x'". Immediately, that's what you think about. Von Trier is the man who 'invented' Dogme95 cinema, the back-to-basics arbitrary rules that included 'The director must not be credited' - itself a pun on the theme of the film. Lines like, "Life is a Dogme film" make us wonder how serious von Trier is as a philosopher, or whether it's a joke at our expense. He can be a bit like the Kristoffer character who gleefully insinuates, "I'm better at being irritating on an intuitive level." Then there are jokes about Danes (who are traditionally afraid of conflict - it is very 'un-Danish to be 'bad cop') and gags that play on a historical power struggle between Denmark and Iceland. The many levels all work so fast that everyone can be laughing at something different at any one time.Structurally, the movie dazzles. It gets seriously into screwball mode and then every so often the Narrator returns to inject a Brechtian distance, reminding us that it is fiction, making us think about how it comments on the real world or insidious office politics. We feel a tension, a need to get away from serious thought and just find out what happens. The narrator bows to our desires and promises, god-like, to resolve the dramatic tensions. (Fans of Shakespeare will recall how the Bard would use a Narrator to draw attention to what we were experiencing and so encourage us to analyse it. The Narrator, in Shakespeare's plays, as in The Boss of It All, could be the true boss, telling us what is really happening beneath the surface.) And the dramatic ending will have you clinging to your seat. Hold on to your sides cos if you laugh too much you might miss something.Ever the creator of some new cinematic technique, von Trier has committed the movie's cinematography to a (published) mathematical formula and principle called 'Automavision'. This is designed to 'limit human interference' and free the work from the force of habit and aesthetics. As with Dogme95, no doubt half the film community will ask if he is serious while another sector will go off and studiously practice it. As an added fillip, Danish fans can play 'Lookey', to find hidden visual elements out of context in the movie and first winner gets to be an extra in the next film. Von Trier has also devised a new ascetic aesthetic to 'rediscover his original enthusiasm for film.' And he's tired of playing 'bad cop' in professional relationships while other people get to be 'good cop' and nice to everyone, yet this master of intellectual creation has taken the experience as inspiration for the film, "poking fun at artsy-fartsy culture."They sometimes say that if God didn't exist you'd have to invent him. Sometimes you just need to know who you are dealing with. You need The Boss of it All. At least in this film Lars von Trier credits himself as Director. Not since The Five Obstructions has the question of authorship been so seriously questioned. Even the character of the actor, who wields enormous power, has to consult his 'character' on how things should proceed.From such serious polemics as Dogville and Manderlay, the cowboy romp of Dear Wendy, the quasi philosophy of The Idiots, and the serious mainstream challenges of Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, one of the most original creative forces in contemporary cinema has turned his technical genius to pure comedy. Gainsayers will still call him pretentious, but they may laugh their socks off before they find out who's telling the joke.