Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Nosferartu (1979)

In his 1979 remake of the 1922 original film, Werner Herzog brings sound and colour to the story, which helps him achieve his usual painterly, mesmerizing style, but he also takes the opportunity to align the story much more closely with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which of course is exactly what Nosferatu is - Dracula with the title and character names changed after a copyright challenge from Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker.

★★★★☆

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