Nymphomaniac, Vols I & II, review Now bisected à la Kill Bill into two roughly two-hour, feature-length volumes, the film's packed with nudity but less eye-wateringly graphic than rumour supposed. Talk about what exactly was cut may threaten to overshadow an achievement that's bounteously clever, and teeming with laughs: it's easily von Trier's funniest picture since The Idiots (1999). This isn't bad going for a wildly intellectual thinkpiece about carnal excess, which begins with its main character, Charlotte Gainsbourg's Joe, beaten up and bleeding in a London alleyway. Scraped off the cobblestones by a passing stranger called Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), Joe recuperates in his shabbily underfurnished flat, and tries to explain why she blames herself for her recent beating, detailing to this gentle Samaritan the many and varied ways in which she considers herself a bad human being. The first of these flashback-chapters begins with Joe aged two, when she first noticed what lay between her legs. Before long she's losing her virginity to LaBeouf's hunky mechanic as a teenager - three thrusts in the front way, five around the back. "Those are Fibonacci numbers!," cries Seligman, whose analytical response to all Joe's reminiscences verges on the autistic. The idea is that Joe is about the most rapacious sexual being on the planet, making Seligman her spiritual opposite - an asexual creature of dry intellect, who has read all the literature on human reproductive urges without ever seemingly having one. As such, he's the perfect receptor for what's intended as a kind of epic slut-bag confessional, passing no judgment, just responding with mild, unaroused and increasingly deadpan surprise. It goes without saying that it's dangerous to be a woman in the middle of a Lars von Trier film, as Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves (1995) or Nicole Kidman in Dogville (2003) would attest. Gainsbourg's Joe, though, is mainly a threat to herself, closer to the character she played in Antichrist (2009) than these others, and comparably hellbent - via sex, not scissors - on removing all sensitivity from her groin. Von Trier folds in one ingenious reference to that companion-piece film: there's an episode, in a child's bedroom, on a snowy night, where it feels the two stories have momentarily blurred into each other. Nymphomaniac, which mainly plays out in the banal home-and-office settings you might expect from a 1970s porn shoot, is less drop-dead gorgeous than Antichrist but significantly more human. What's most sophisticated is the almost Stoppardian way its various digressions and apparent jokes bear fruit later on. It's typical of von Trier to turn erotics into maths and vice versa, but wait until you see how the Fibonacci business pays off, and what it has to do with Bach's organ music, and why both help to explain Joe's seemingly unquenchable longing for multiple partners. Not everything in the movie works and some elements fail quite badly. You'll often wonder what accent LaBeouf's attempting, and Christian Slater's role as Joe's father culminates in an emotionally grandiose black-and-white hospital sequence that feels under-rehearsed. I wanted the nearly-wonderful final scene to end before it does. But it's amazing how often von Trier's able to re-steer his film, and oddly to deepen it, with simple cuts to Skarsgård's face - whether Joe has just recounted an unholy episode of levitation at age 12, or taken us through a visual gallery of the various penises she's seen in their flaccid state. It's an elementary gag, to place a craggy Swedish visage at the end of this wrinkled slideshow, but it's also a deeply hilarious one, worthy of Buñuel. Uma Thurman has one high-camp belter of a scene as a ball of wronged-wife hysteria bouncing off the walls, and it's either the worst or the best thing she's ever done: it almost doesn't matter if you can't decide. The point is that you could watch these films for four hours, then spend 14 arguing about them - about whether sex, for vor Trier, is an eternal human mystery, or a cosmic joke at our expense. Nymphomaniac, Vols I & II are released on 7th and 14th March