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.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS