LARS Von Trier is the Danish director who believes in simplifying cinema, filming with hand-held cameras, going for the grain of documentary truth.

Truth was, the Dogme movement he co-founded was no more real or fake than any cinematic conceit. He just made weirder films than Hollywood, allegedly driving Icelandic pop pixie Bjork to chew her clothes in frustration when filming Dancer In The Dark.

Now Von Trier has moved on from Dogme to Dogville, a work as ambitious and epic and pioneering and strange as you could wish from this outsider with the cult pulling power of a Robert Altman.

Made by a man who has never set foot on American soil, Dogville is less-than-subtle attack on America. American leading lights Chloe Sevigny, James Caan, Lauren Bacall appear only too happy to join him in his attack, and so too are fashionable Brit Paul Bettany, velvet-voiced narrator John Hurt and the Aussie with the free spirit, Nicole Kidman.

Von Trier has created the mythical mining village of Dogville as if his set were a board game. Props are kept to a minimum of walls and costumes on an open-plan sound-stage, with the actors called on to mime the opening and closing of doors in the style of Brecht's plays. Houses, a dog kennel and gooseberry bushes are marked out on the floor.

In this mythical Depression-era village, beautiful fugitive Grace (Kidman) is seeking shelter from the mob and her shadowy past. Sympathetic town philosopher Tom (Bettany) persuades the circumspect townsfolk to let her stay, in exchange for her doing the chores they had never previously considered necessary.

Grace's story is told in nine chapters and a prologue, each related by Hurt's eternally chirpy yet cutting narrator, a one-man Greek chorus with a milk man's whistle in his voice. All around him darkens, as the community ignores Tom's lectures on acceptance, instead turning Grace into an exploited, abused prisoner. Guantanimo Bay comes to mind.

As with his previous studies of female martyrdom and emotional psychology, Breaking The Waves and Dancing In The Dark, Dogville makes the camera feel as if it is intruding where it should not pry. Nicole Kidman is all but stripped bare as never before.

Updated: 09:20 Friday, February 13, 2004