Dogville is a major work by a major director, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. That said, this is going to sound an awful lot like a negative review, and maybe it is:

Dogville is less painful but more offensive than Dancer in the Dark (which I think is one of the best of all recent films). The difference, I think, involves the director's willingness to subject himself, as well as his audience, to the ordeal of his own movie. Both Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark were films that could be terrifically cruel to their actors and viewers, but there was also the exhilarating sense in both that von Trier was putting his own soul on the line, that he was intentionally going off the map and pushing against the bounds of his own sanity, along with Bjork's and Emily Watson's. Maybe the experience wore him out, because Dogville, while undeniably amazing, is curiously free of risk. Von Trier is outside his movie, indifferent, paring his nails. Everything is as neat as mathematics.

This seems to have rubbed off on the cast. By all accounts, Bjork lived her role in Dancer in the Dark; the actors in Dogville, by contrast, come off as members of a very good repertory theater company. Nicole Kidman, like her former husband, is too smart and driven to seem convincingly vulnerable onscreen. Only Patricia Clarkson, in a couple of scenes as an embittered housewife, manages to break through Von Trier's cold, clinical algebra lesson. And yet...it wouldn't surprise me if, a decade from now, Dogville is the only movie from this year that I even remember. I can't exactly recommend it, but I can't stop thinking about it, either. I still think that Lars von Trier, along with Wong Kar-Wai, is the most interesting director in the world today, and Dogville will long stand as one of those inexplicable tourist attractions of the cinema that put most other movies to shame.

Should you bother seeing it? All I can say is this: if you ever end up in a theater where Dogville is being shown, you might want to take a seat, and be sure to sit through to the very end. Whether or not you end up in that theater in the first place, of course, is entirely your own business.