Nosferatu the Vampyre (Germany, 1979), Werner Herzog’s eerie color remake of F.W. Murnau’s original vampire classic (itself an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula), is at once faithful to Murnau’s film and quintessentially Herzogian. Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s demon alter ego, is both hideous and haunting as the chalk-skinned gargoyle, a melancholy monster seeking an end […]
Neither remake nor sequel in any conventional sense of the terms, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (2009) takes the basic premise out of the Abel Ferrara universe of guilt and redemption and drops it into post-Katrina New Orleans and the Herzog world of indifferent and unforgiving nature. It really is a […]
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) – Werner Herzog’s documentary opens on eerie and otherworldly underwater footage under the Antarctic ice shelf, a wet desert of sparse visible marine life cast blue by sunlight glowing through the ice above, and goes on to explore an active Antarctic volcano spewing magma into a deep […]
It’s easy to see why German filmmaker Werner Herzog was so fascinated by Timothy Treadwell, the former beach bum turned self-made wildlife activist and grizzly bear guardian. Treadwell spent thirteen summers living amidst the grizzly bears of the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska until he, along with his girlfriend and traveling partner, Amie […]
It didn’t make the final cut for the Oscar documentary shortlist but Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2001) is a beautiful and breathtaking work of non-fiction and one of the best films of 2011. The film is built around an exploration of the ancient Chauvet Cave, home to the oldest human artwork known to […]
