Lars von Trier’s latest effort, a comedy set among a quirky set of employees of a small software firm, can’t possibly escape comparisons to The Office (the BBC version, of course), or even Office Space. My expectation, as an admirer of the Danish director, was to encounter a clever yet obtuse comedy. I was right. Much to my surprise, however, the film is very, very funny. So much so that I found myself doing something rare during a comedy: laughing out loud. My fellow audience members at the Siskel Center, where the film just had a week-long run, were considerably more vocal than me.
Von Trier is an unabashed manipulator, and the comic tension in The Boss of It All begins almost immediately. 
We learn that Kristoffer, a self-aggrandizing but unsuccessful actor, has been tapped by Ravn, a small IT company’s general counsel, to pretend to be the company president during an important meeting with the head of an Icelandic company. This charade is meant to be short-lived, but the Icelander unexpectedly insists on seeing the president at a subsequent meeting the following week. Desperate, Ravn confides to Kristoffer that he is actually the company owner, but that years ago he created a fictitious “Boss of It All” to serve as a scape goat for his unpopular management decisions.
Kristoffer welcomes the prospect of continuing his role, seeing 
this opportunity as the ultimate acting challenge, considering his abject ignorance of software development. To make matters worse, Kristoffer soon learns that Ravn has, over the years, given the boss “character” slightly different traits to each of the six top-level executives, depending on his need to manipulate them.
This is von Trier’s only foray into a full-fledged comedy since 1998’s The Idiots, and it is a welcome return. However, the film would improve significantly by cutting several minutes from the slow second act. (Hedging his bets, von Trier announces at the end of the film that some may have wanted less, and some more.) The film ends as absurdly as it began, and throughout the process von Trier has injected our subconscious with the fragments of a moral fable.Although the first two installments of von Trier’s America trilogy (Dogville and Manderlay) may have alienated some, this Danish-language production is, ironically, more apt to have universal appeal. I hope it gets some more exposure.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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