The Third Man Scheme

TITLE: ZENTROPA

DIRECTOR: LARS VON TRIER

WRITERS: LARS VON TRIER and NIELS VORSEL

THE BOTTOM LINE: The staid European cinema comes alive with an epic as big and mysterious as the Continent.

There is a new style in European cinema -- finally. For three decades, since Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson made anomie fashionable, European directors have dreamed -- or nightmared -- small. Their movies are dyspeptic miniatures: people sitting at a kitchen table, silent, sullen, waiting for the worst. Everybody, on both sides of the camera, has the glums. The camerabatic dazzle of, say, the French New Wave is now...