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In Jon Favreau's 2008 film "Iron Man," the title hero (Robert Downey Jr.) was assisted in his high-tech superhero lab by an artificially intelligent butler-like presence named J.A.R.V.I.S. Iron Man's digital butler not only wrangled the hero's complicated engineering projects, but also controlled the even-higher-tech devices in his lab. When Iron Man went out on patrol, J.A.R.V.I.S.'s voice could be heard inside his helmet. J.A.R.V.I.S. was voiced by Paul Bettany. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe continued to grow, so too did Iron Man's computerized friend. Eventually, J.A.R.V.I.S. was shunted into an indestructible android body and renamed Vision (also Bettany). 

When Vision became sentient and autonomous, that meant Tony Stark had to program a new computer helper, and invented F.R.I.D.A.Y. (voiced by Kerry Condon...

Filmmaker Werner Herzog believes that Star Wars offers a new perspective on humans' role in the universe and that its mythology is significant. Despite criticism, Herzog thinks Star Wars is important not only in the film industry but also in culture as it creates new mythologies and a fresh way of seeing our place in the universe. The world-building and mythology of Star Wars is a major factor that makes the franchise appealing and why Disney has the potential to create countless projects based on its characters and plots.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog, who played The Client in the first season of The Mandalorian, thinks Star Wars presents a new way to understand humans' role in the universe and that the mythology of the franchise is really important. The universe created by George Lucas has proven to be one of the most vast and complex in the world of cinema. More...

Legendary director Werner Herzog, one of the founders of the German New Wave, whose films embrace obsessive quests and maddening conflicts with nature, will receive the American Society of Cinematographers’ Board of Governors Award at the 34th annual Asc Awards on January 25 (at Hollywood & Highland’s Ray Dolby Ballroom).

“Werner Herzog is truly a unique storyteller, and we are honored to recognize him for his prolific contributions to cinema,” said Asc President Kees van Oostrum.

Herzog has produced, written, and directed more than 70 feature and documentary films. His volatile, love-hate relationship with actor Klaus Kinski resulted in such powerful films as “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” and “Woyzeck.” Other masterpieces include “Stroszek” and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” both starring street musician-turned actor Bruno S.

Herzog received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature for “Encounters at the End of the World,” while “Little Dieter Needs to Fly...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Amazing Grace (Sydney Pollack)

A time capsule that’s as fresh and powerful an experience as it must have been when recorded live in Watts in 1972, Amazing Grace is arguably one of the year’s most-anticipated films arriving after years of litigation and a fetal technical glitch that was resolved thanks to digital workflows. The film that exists, finished by producer Alan Elliot, bursts with intimacy and immediacy capturing a captivating and sublime performance by Aretha Franklin. In between the incredible artistry we discover and are introduced to several influences of Franklin’s including her father the minister and civil rights activist Cl Franklin who provides...

At the end of every calendar year, critics rank the best movies of the past 12 months. But why wait that long when first-rate cinema is opening every month? This ongoing list is proof that there’s plenty worth celebrating all year long. While the quality of studio movies tends to peak in the summer and fall seasons, they represent just one small piece of the much larger equation. For those of us tracking a range of quality movies released throughout the year, the hunt often begins much earlier, when many of these titles first surface on the festival circuit. Other indies benefit from savvy marketing strategies, a cavalcade of rave reviews, or awards season buzz, but all of them deserve singling out as the best indies of the year so far.

The format for this developing resource is simple: Any movie reviewed by IndieWire that has received a B+ or higher makes the cut.

It’s tempting to think of “An Elephant Sitting Still” as a suicide note written with blood in a dirty patch of hard snow. Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while (Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse” come to mind), and the man who made it — a former student of Tarr’s — killed himself before the world premiere of his monolithic first (and last) feature. His name was Hu Bo, and he was 29 years old.

Hu had reportedly been feuding with his financiers, who wanted to cut the running time in half. But to presume the role that may have played in his death would be as problematic as assimilating Hu’s suicide — which inevitably casts a long shadow over the film — into...

When a European director makes his or her first movie in the United States, you can pretty much rely on two things: the camera’s awe at the wide-open spaces and big skies, and a downbeat story of how the Land of Opportunity so often lets its most helpless citizens fall between the cracks.

So on the American Miserabilism shelf at your local shuttered video store, you can put Andrew Haigh’s powerful and poignant “Lean on Pete” alongside such other classics of the genre as Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey.”

“Lean on Pete” calls to mind other greats as well — one imagines a pitch meeting where it was described as “The 400 Blows” meets “Wendy and Lucy” — but writer-director Haigh, working from the novel by Willy Vlautin, has his own way of telling this kind of story. While the film’s semi-picaresque, road-trip nature might seem antithetical to the maker of such intimate dramas as “Weekend” and “45 Years,” Haigh brings his gifts as a filmmaker with him to the great outdoors, always capturing little moments of character and emotion even in an expanse of seemingly infinite American desert.

Also Read: 'A Quiet Place' Film Review: Make Some Noise for John Krasinski's Nerve-Racking Horror Tale

Teenage Charlie (Charlie Plummer, “Boardwalk Empire”) has just moved to Portland, Oregon, with his ne’er-do-well dad Ray (Travis Fimmel). Mom is long-gone, and Charlie’s only other family is his loving aunt Margy (Alison Elliott, “20th Century Women”), who he hasn’t seen since childhood after she and Ray had a squabble about how he’s been raising Charlie. (When Charlie was 12, Ray left the boy alone for several days to spend time with a woman.)

Their new house is near a racetrack, and Charlie ingratiates himself with small-time horse owner Del (Steve Buscemi), working with him at the stable and traveling with him to seedy races on the state-fair circuit. Along the way, Charlie befriends Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), a jockey who rides Del’s horses from time to time. Bonnie tries to tell Charlie that the horses aren’t pets, and that he shouldn’t get attached, but it’s too late — he’s already bonded with an aging Quarter Horse named Lean on Pete, even though the racer is coming to the end of his career, likely to be “sent to Mexico” (where horses can be legally slaughtered) once his use to Del has run out.

Also Read: 'Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana' Film Review: Neil Gaiman, George Romero and Others Reflect on Free Speech

When the husband of Ray’s latest conquest beats Ray bad enough to send him to the hospital, Charlie has to elude Family Services while still earning money to keep up the household. But as Ray’s condition worsens, and Lean on Pete seems destined to be destroyed, Charlie steals Del’s truck in an attempt to save the horse and to look for Margy in Wyoming.

As you might imagine, Charlie’s journey gets more and more bleak as he faces starvation, thirst and eventual homelessness. But while “Lean on Pete” certainly has its dark moments, and its 119 minutes seem like it’s never going stop throwing obstacles in Charlie’s way, there’s ultimately a sense of hope here, much of it being communicated by Plummer, in an extraordinary performance. There’s so little calculation or actorliness in his work that I thought Haigh had found a 15-year-old non-actor; I was surprised to learn after the fact that Plummer is an experienced pro with an ascendant career. (He’s about to play kidnap victim John Paul Getty III in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming “All the Money in the World.”)

Also Read: 'Tyler Perry's Acrimony' Film Review: Taraji P. Henson Is Furious, But Is She Right?

The anguish and determination that Plummer can display with just a look or subtle motion is heartbreaking; this is the kind of naturalistic acting that can just kick you in the stomach. He’s part of a strong ensemble: Buscemi’s Del makes an honest mentor, but he doesn’t sugarcoat the character’s darker side. (And it’s fun to see the easy chemistry between Buscemi and Sevigny: she starred in his feature directorial debut “Trees Lounge” two decades ago.) Steve Zahn turns up as a mercurial homeless man who offers Charlie some help along the way, and Elliott (an indie stalwart since her breakout role in “The Spitfire Grill”) radiates a warmth that makes you realize why finding Margy is worth Charlie’s Herculean effort.

Haigh adjusts to a different kind of storytelling here: “Weekend” was fairly dialogue-heavy (as was, to an extent, his little-seen debut “Greek Pete”), and unlike “45 Days,” he can’t substitute dialogue with a meaningful glance from Charlotte Rampling. Still, he manages a lot of quiet here — with the exception of some exposition dumps that Charlie gives the horse in conversation — and his storytelling is no less powerful. Danish cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Joenck (“A War”), also working in the States for the first time, collaborates with Haigh to place the characters into a very specific context, finding both beauty and horror in the American sprawl.

Your gut will be wrenched by “Lean on Pete,” but it’s also quite likely that your heart will be touched. It’s a powerful new entry for a director who is ever more deserving of attention, and it provides a spotlight for a talented young actor who would appear to be going places.

Read original story ‘Lean on Pete’ Review: Andrew Haigh’s Boy-and-His-Horse Tale Hits Hard At TheWrap...

When a European director makes his or her first movie in the United States, you can pretty much rely on two things: the camera’s awe at the wide-open spaces and big skies, and a downbeat story of how the Land of Opportunity so often lets its most helpless citizens fall between the cracks. So on the American Miserabilism shelf at your local shuttered video store, you can put Andrew Haigh’s powerful and poignant “Lean on Pete” alongside such other classics of the genre as Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey.” “Lean on Pete” calls to mind other greats as...

When a European director makes his or her first movie in the United States, you can pretty much rely on two things: the camera’s awe at the wide-open spaces and big skies, and a downbeat story of how the Land of Opportunity so often lets its most helpless citizens fall between the cracks. So on the American Miserabilism shelf at your local shuttered video store, you can put Andrew Haigh’s powerful and poignant “Lean on Pete” alongside such other classics of the genre as Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey.” “Lean on Pete” calls to mind other greats as.

The Last Emperor composers David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto had a Forbidden Colors conversation at the Quad Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the Quad Cinema - Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise; Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth; Mitchell Leisen's Hold Back The Dawn; Elia Kazan's America, America; Werner Herzog's Stroszek; Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America, Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky with Anne Carlisle become Immigrant Songs. Retrospectives for Goldie Hawn, Frank Perry & Eleanor Perry, Bertrand Tavernier and Ryuichi Sakamoto; a Rainer Werner Fassbinder Lola First Encounter with Sandra Bernhard, Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear and a drop of Nathan Silver's Thirst Street come up in my conversation with Director of Programming C Mason Wells.

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor at China: Through The Looking Glass Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Grandmaster director Wong Kar Wai chose a clip from...

A noticeable improvement over Adam Sandler’s previous three Netflix originals — in much the same way that a glass of Manischewitz is a noticeable improvement over drinking one of those ominous puddles that forms in the groove of a New York City subway seat — “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane.

Too familiar to stand out from Baumbach’s career, but too funny and textured and true to not be one of its highlights, “The Meyerowitz Stories” harkens back to the more savage and sprawling comedies that Baumbach made before he teamed up with Greta Gerwig (whose ebullient influence is noticeably absent from this material, if not always missing from it). Still, this even-handed, mutually destructively, and inextricably Jewish-American family saga marks a major departure for Baumbach in one...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

“Il Bello Marcello” highlights Italy’s greatest actor and, in turn, its greatest filmmakers.

Stalker continues its run.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Caan Film Festival is underway! Films from Michael Mann, Coppola, Hawks, and more kick it off.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari plays on Sunday.

Metrograph

A...

Attempted to be billed as an “ecological thriller” by programmers when it made the festival rounds last year, Werner Herzog’s Salt and Fire defies any of the strict genre labels that can be thrown its way. Likely to go down as an oddity even within an already eclectic filmography, the film can be considered alongside Stroszek and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as one of the director’s funniest films, at least depending on your taste. Many critics found their patience tested by its numerous non-sequiturs, while others fell for the deft comic timing of lead Michael Shannon as the world’s unlikeliest CEO. Regardless, the film came as a nice reminder from a man who was threatening to be remembered more as a meme than great filmmaker. We were lucky enough to have a brief chat with Herzog, which also included mention of his period epic Queen of the Desert,...

On Tuesday, Americans go to the voting booth to determine what kind of country they want theirs to be. Months of the most polarized, and polarizing, presidential campaign in recent memory have left many of us with battle fatigue and gnawing pangs of cynicism and nausea. To quote Thomas McGuane, in the opening line of his 1973 novel “92 in the Shade”: “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic.”

Our filmmakers might have a clue. And a little distance brings perspective. The American Film Festival just celebrated its seventh annual survey of new (and mostly) independent cinema made in the U.S.A., as assembled for and viewed by eager European audiences in Wroclaw, Poland. Though not without some escapist and experimental tangents, the selections couldn’t help but offer a provocative composite of work that serves as a kind of state of the union address.

StroszekWerner Herzog is funny. It’s unfortunate that this needs to be restated, but such is the cultural conversation—between those who seem not to have taken Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) seriously enough (if at all) and those who prefer their auteurs give off the rarified air of a Tarkovsky, musing under a tree. Of course, the truth is both and neither; that Herzog has always been one for whom exercises in the absurd or even slapstick come in lock step with declarations of his artistic chops. The missing of this proverbial boat is epitomized in “The memeification of Werner Herzog: Why the respected director should be respected for his genius, not regarded as a joke,” published in the National Post last month. The article argues un-controversially that Werner Herzog is a very good filmmaker always worthy of more attention, but then argues that in spite of what...

Many lament the “meme-ification” of Werner Herzog, a name once synonymous with masculinist, bravura filmmaking that risked the lives of cast and crew for the sake of art, but now the name only draws Borat– / Austin Powers-level of vocal impression saturation. But with Herzog, maybe it’s always been a case of “print the legend.” As wonderful as Stroszek, Fitzcarraldo and Lessons of Darkness may be, his self-aggrandizing “personal brand” has always been apparent: not so much the bravest of film artists as one who just simply has all the right ingredients to appear to be. This seems especially the case coming off two films that were widely derided as for-hire gigs, Queen of the Desert and Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, which this writer admits he couldn’t even bare himself to watch. Putting aside his public personality, could we simply get another good film?

Almost instantly does his newest work,...

The Internet is all around us, connecting humans with each other and providing the world with more information than ever before, but what is its existential impact? How has it changed our worldviews? Director Werner Herzog chronicles the virtual world from its origins to its outermost reaches in his new documentary “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.” Containing interviews with such luminaries as Bob Kahn, Elon Musk, and Sebastian Thrun, Herzog explores the digital landscape with his trademark curiosity and sparks a number of provocative conversations about how the online world has immeasurably transformed our real world, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and even our personal relationships. Watch an exclusive promo for the film below.

Read More: Sundance Review: Werner Herzog’s ‘Lo and Behold’ Will Make You Experience the Internet in New Ways

Werner Herzog is one of the more acclaimed film directors of the 20th century.

Werner Herzog gets a lot of accolades as a documentary filmmaker these days, but his fiction work is a pretty big deal, too—it’s just that once you make a movie about a real guy getting eaten by a bear, people tend to forget about the other stuff. Arthouse streaming service Mubi still cares about Herzog’s fiction films, though, so it’s holding a month-long tribute called “Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Fictions” that will temporarily add five classic Herzog films—several of which feature his best fiend, Klaus Kinski—to Mubi’s ever-changing collection. The five films are Nosferatu The Vampyre, Woyzeck, Stroszek, Heart Of Glass, and Fitzcarraldo, and you can see glimpses of each one in the trailer Mubi put together up above. To learn more about Mubi’s Herzog collection (or to learn more about Mubi’s curated approach to movie streaming), you can go to...

Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Fictions, a retrospective dedicated to Werner Herzog's fiction filmmaking, will be running on Mubi in the United States from May 28 - July 29, 2016.My Best Fiend: A metaphor for...something "It’s a great metaphor,” Werner Herzog declares proudly towards the end of My Best Fiend, his autobiographical reflection on fifteen years of cinematic collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski. The metaphor in question is visual. Herzog and film set photographer Beat Presser are looking at a black and white photo hanging in Presser’s apartment. It’s a striking tableau and gripping enough that it would become the poster image for Herzog's 1982 collaboration with Kinski, Fitzcarraldo. The titular character stands in the foreground, yet with his back to the camera. His emotions are unavailable, but he is undoubtedly preoccupied with the 300 ton steamboat high above him at an impossible 90 degree angle, as it disappears up...

Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.The first Notebook appearance of the legendary Berlin establishment named 'Stadtklause' ("city retreat") was in 2009, when I described it as "an unremarkable-looking pub where, some evenings, a certain 'Bruno S' can be found playing his accordion and singing old Berlin songs. If you've seen Werner Herzog's Stroszek, you will know whom and what I am talking about. Bruno S was the star of that movie, and also of Herzog's Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and for my money he's at least as important Herzog-collaborator as the rather better-known (and much-lamented) Klaus Kinski." Seven years later and Bruno S. is sadly no longer with us, but the Stadtklause remains. It's still a handy and unpretentious watering-hole on Bernburger Strasse near Anhalter Bahnhof, just a short walk from Potsdamer Platz, the grimly modernistic epicentre of the Berlinale...

The Conversation is a feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their seventh piece, they discuss Wim Wenders’s modern classic Paris, Texas (1984).

Landon’S Take

Throughout Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), Travis Henderson (played by Harry Dean Stanton) carries with him a photograph of an empty lot he bought in the eponymous city, which he later tells his son is near “the Red River” that borders Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The reference automatically draws to mind Howard Hawks’s beloved 1948 Western, Red River, which drew together an unlikely screen pair with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. That Hawks classic was also featured prominently in Peter Bogdanovich’s canonical 1971 film The Last Picture Show as the “last picture” of the film’s title exhibited at a dwindling moviehouse in an increasingly barren West Texas small town.

Long before he developed the still controversial cinematic technique of utilizing reenactments in The Thin Blue Line or his confessional-esque straight-to-lens Interrotron which was used for the first time in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and continues to employ in works like his recent It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports series for Espn, Errol Morris was struck by the absurdities found within the average American. Superbly paired together in their first HD home releases by the Criterion Collection, Morris’s first two features, Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida, simply observe the expressive outpourings of rural folk, the lens taking in their unaccountably amusing opinions, worries and musings on life and local events with local, unadorn color featuring above all.

The start of Morris’s filmmaking career unfolded in the wake of working alongside friend and provocateur Werner Herzog on Stroszek after failing to follow through with his...

Eva Mattes, who turns 60 today, has been acting on stage and in front of the camera since she was twelve. Internationally, she'll probably always be associated with the New German Cinema. She was still a teenager when she appeared as a Vietnamese rape victim in Michael Verhoeven's o.k. (1970), which caused an uproar at the Berlinale. In 1979, Mattes won a Best Supporting Actress award in Cannes for her performance in Werner Herzog's Woyzeck. She'd previously worked with him on Stroszek (1977). She appeared in several films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and played him two years after his death in Ein Mann wie Eva. More recently, Mattes has appeared in Frieder Schlaich's Otomo (1999), Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Percy Adlon's Mahler on the Couch (2010). » - David Hudson...

Eva Mattes, who turns 60 today, has been acting on stage and in front of the camera since she was twelve. Internationally, she'll probably always be associated with the New German Cinema. She was still a teenager when she appeared as a Vietnamese rape victim in Michael Verhoeven's o.k. (1970), which caused an uproar at the Berlinale. In 1979, Mattes won a Best Supporting Actress award in Cannes for her performance in Werner Herzog's Woyzeck. She'd previously worked with him on Stroszek (1977). She appeared in several films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and played him two years after his death in Ein Mann wie Eva. More recently, Mattes has appeared in Frieder Schlaich's Otomo (1999), Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Percy Adlon's Mahler on the Couch (2010). » - David Hudson...

Stroszek

Written an directed by Werner Herzog

Germany, 1977

You really can’t go wrong with any of the 16 titles included in Herzog: The Collection, the recently released limited edition Blu-ray set. This stunning compendium features several of the incomparable Werner Herzog’s finest fiction and documentary films (including many that fall somewhere between those categories), most available for the first time on Blu-ray. Though the strongest cases could be made for Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, it would be difficult to necessarily pick the “best” film included here, but one movie that has always stood out as being among Herzog’s most unusual is Stroszek, from 1977. Well received upon its release, and now recognized as one of the German filmmaker’s finest films, Stroszek is something of an enigma in Herzog’s career full of enigmatic works.

The picture follows three Berliners as they flee their homeland for...

If you gaze into Werner Herzog talking about Werner Herzog for long enough, does Werner Herzog gaze back into you? I pondered that question in late June as the 71-year-old director sat across from me at a conference table in the Santa Monica offices of Shout! Factory, the production house behind the newly released Herzog: The Collection, a Blu-ray retrospective featuring 16 of his early art-house films, including the masterpieces Stroszek (1977) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1979), hits like Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and self-reflective meta-documentaries like My Best Fiend (1999) and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997). Leading up to the interview, I had immersed myself in so many Herzog movies, so many documentaries, and so many mini-featurettes — and then re-watched the films to hear Herzog’s commentary tracks — that by the time I was in his presence asking him questions and listening to him respond in his famously...

Herzog: The Collection I've been reviewing Werner Herzog movies for the last 13 weeks or whatever it is and all in anticipation of this new 16-film collection from Shout Factory, which finally releases today and includes Even Dwarfs Started Small, Land of Silence and Darkness, Fata Morgana, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Stroszek, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, Ballad of the Little Soldier, Where the Green Ants Dream, Cobra Verde, Lessons of Darkness, Little Dieter Needs to Fly and My Best Fiend. Of the bunch I can tell you flat out Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo are great films and that's without the special features this set contains, which are: English Audio Commentaries: Even Dwarfs Started Small, Fata Morgana, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass,...

Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Shout! Factory:

A visionary creator unlike any other, with a passion for unveiling truths about nature and existence by blurring the line between reality and fiction, Werner Herzog is undoubtedly one of cinema’s most controversial and enigmatic figures. Audiences the world over have marveled at his uniquely moving, often disturbing, but always awe-inspiring stories, and his ever-growing body of work has inspired an untold number of filmmakers. He is, and continues to be, the most daring filmmaker of our time.

In celebration of this cinematic vanguard, Shout! Factory will release Herzog: The Collection on July 29th, 2014. Limited to 5,000 copies, the 13-disc box set features 16 acclaimed films and documentaries, 15 of which are making their Blu-ray debuts. Herzog: The Collection also features a 40 page booklet that includes photos, an essay by award-winning author Stephen J. Smith, and in-depth film synopses by Herzog...

Werner Herzog's Stroszek is exactly what you'd expect from the eccentric filmmaker, which is to say it's somewhat inexplicable, entrancing, honest and leaves us scratching our heads for meaning as much as it all seems crystal clear. I've seen it referred to as a comedy and I guess if you consider the premise it does sound like one of those "a rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into a bar" jokes, but therein lies the mystery of Herzog, a man that will take a mildly retarded ex-con, a prostitute and an elderly German man and offer a scenario wherein the trio pack up, leave Germany and make a new home in Wisconsin. Makes perfect sense... rightc The film's origins are as wild, if not more so, than the premise. Herzog originally intended to cast his lead actor, Bruno S. (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), in Woyzeck only to...

One of my busier movie watching weeks this year with seven movies to the credit of the last seven days, which includes Transformers for the sake of our audio commentary and Michael Bay's The Island for an article ranking Bay's films which became a journal entry instead, since I couldn't find reason to talk about most of his films until yesterday's editorial. I also watched a new Zatoichi film in Zatoichi and the One Armed Swordsman, which I enjoyed, then, of course, Transformers: Age of Extinction (my review). This weekend I ended up watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek, Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac Volume I and II and the new Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, all of which I'll be writing much more about soon enough, if not all this week. Coming this week I'll be catching screenings of Tammy and Deliver Us from Evil, the latter of which...

This week involved a lot of movies at home, including the new Blu-ray for Double Indemnity, the new Blu-ray for William Friedkin's Sorcerer (read my review here) and, last night, I watched Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God on Fandor.com as I'll be reviewing 16 of Herzog's upcoming movies leading up to Shout Factory's release of Herzog: The Collection Limited Edition on July 29. The set includes Even Dwarfs Started Small, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Land Of Silence And Darkness, Fitzcarraldo, Fata Morgana, Ballad Of Little Soldier, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, Where The Green Ants Dream, The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, Cobra Verde, Heart Of Glass, Lessons Of Darkness, Stroszek, Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Woyzeck and My Best Fiend and Fandor will be releasing one new title each week leading up to the release, each in HD. Of that lot, I've only seen Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo before,...

There are filmmakers and then there's Werner Herzog, with his distinctive, unique form of features and documentaries carving out a special place in cinematic history. His oeuvre is large and you might not know where to begin or how to start. But don't worry, Shout Factory has you covered. The home video company is issuing a limited edition (only 5,000 copies!) box set, "Herzog: The Collection," featuring 16 of his acclaimed films and documentaries, 15 of which are making their Blu-ray debuts. Damn. The movies included are: "Even Dwarfs Started Small," "Land of Silence and Darkness," "Fata Morgana," "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser," "Heart of Glass," "Stroszek," "Woyzeck," "Nosferatu the Vampyre," "Fitzcarraldo," "Ballad of the Little Soldier," "Where the Green Ants Dream," "Cobra Verde," "Lessons of Darkness," "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" and "My Best Fiend." To hold you over until you can devour those films, here's an extensive,...

We can’t imagine what you do with your spare time and quite frankly it’s best we never find out, but the good folks over at The Seventh Art are often scouring the internet for hidden video gems. The stuff that they’re able to find is rarely disappointing and this video in particular is quite the find. They have uncovered a 1970s BBC documentary called “Signs of Vigorous Life” which explores the then-bourgeoning New German Cinema movement. The doc includes Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. “Signs of Vigorous Life” captures this special time in cinema history just as it started to rise, right when each of these directors were in their prime. We’re talking before Herzog made “Stroszek” or Schlöndorff made “The Tin Drum.” Or, better yet, years before Fassbinder would embark on his Brd trilogy. These young German filmmakers...

On the surface, Kumiko is fanciful. As portrayed by Rinko Kikuchi, the isolated, lonely lead character of David and Nathan Zellner’s epic Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter dons an oversized red hoodie, sports a messy cropped bob, has one friend — a bunny named Bunzo — and leaves Japan on a quest to a buried treasure. Specifically, the briefcase full of cash that she sees buried in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo after she finds a distorted VHS copy of the 1996 film. It could have easily devolved into whimsy, but on film, she’s a driven folk adventurer on a high stakes,...

The heroes over at Shout! Factory have recently announced that they'll be remastering and releasing 16—count 'em, 16—films by Werner Herzog in several formats both physical and digital. Shout! will be releasing titles chiefly from Herzog's 70s and '80s back catalog, when the Bavaria-born director was still largely working in German (if not necessarily in Germany, jungles feature pretty heavily in some of these pictures), and their list includes both documentaries, shorts and feature films.Per the official announcement, these “include Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Nosferatu The Vampyre, The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser, Woyzeck, Heart Of Glass, Cobra Verde, Stroszek, Fata Morgana, Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Lessons Of Darkness, Ballad Of The Little Soldier, Land Of Silence And Darkness as well as several other acclaimed titles." Anyone with a grasp of counting will conclude that “several” here equals three, and they are: “Where...

Aguirre, The Wrath of God starring Klaus Kinski is one of the films in the Herzog/Shout! Factory agreement.

Shout! Factory and Werner Herzog Film Gmbh have announced an exclusive, multi-picture alliance for 16 Werner Herzog film titles, all of which are currently being re-mastered in high-definition for new edition releases in North America.

This multi-year alliance provides Shout! Factory extensive rights for the films, including digital distribution, home video and broadcast for cross-platform releases. The titles include Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Woyzeck, Heart of Glass, Cobra Verde, Stroszek, Fata Morgana, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Lessons of Darkness, Ballad of the Little Soldier, Land of Silence and Darkness, as well as several other acclaimed titles.

Shout! Factory plans an aggressive rollout of these movies through physical home entertainment releases and a variety of digital entertainment distribution platforms. The label and...

★★★★☆ Rereleased to tie in with a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank, it's been almost forty years since Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) debuted on screens. Although a little obtuse and raggedy at times, this beguiling and fable-like yarn sits within his finest work. Loosely based on a real-life tale, the film follows Kaspar Hauser (Bruno Schleinstein) who has spent the first seventeen years of his life chained up like an animal in a confined, grotty cellar. One day, the young man is mysteriously released into captivity, taught some phrases and how to walk, and taken to the town of Nuremberg.

Unsurprisingly, Hauser's looked upon as a genuine curio by the inquisitive townsfolk, and finds himself being entered into the freak show of a travelling circus, before a kindly Professor Daumer (Walter Ladengast) adopts him. Under close scrutiny from the authorities, Hauser appears to be a savant of sorts.

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly Ioncinephile profile (read here), we ask the filmmaker the incredibly arduous task of identifying their top ten list of favorite films. Matt Boyd (A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument), provided us with his all time top ten film list (dated: February 2013).

Beau Travail – Claire Denis (1999)

“I’m terrible with remembering story lines, plot points, even song lyrics…usually its scenes, images, tones, sounds, melody and mood that stick with me. Films that play more like dreams. This film is a masterpiece of that kind of filmmaking, and so a masterpiece in my mind. And, the final credit sequence! Rhythm of the Night and Denis Lavant! It has to be the best dance scene in film history. It’s in such contrast to the rest of the film and yet somehow the perfect ending.

From dragging a steamship across a mountain to eating his own shoes, Werner Herzog has always traded in the unexpected. Now he is co-starring in a Tom Cruise action film

Werner Herzog has dragged a real-life steamship across a real-life mountain; he once pulled a gun on his longtime star collaborator Klaus Kinski and told him to act or die; he took a film crew to the lip of la Grande Soufrière, a volcano in Guadeloupe that seismologists had predicted would erupt at any moment (it didn't); he was accidentally shot in the stomach during a filmed interview with the BBC ("It is not a significant bullet") and once, aided by Californian chef Alice Waters, he cooked – with garlic and herbs – and then ate his own shoe, an event chronicled in his friend Les Blank's evocatively title docushort Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

These are the bedrock fables of the...

Let the record show, Werner Herzog is the best when it comes to choosing music--after all, he said so last night. Talking to a completely full room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rose Theater after a screening of "The White Diamond," Herzog mulled over opera and working with musicians, and briefly entertained a Nicholas Cage question over an hour-and-a-half dialogue with moderator Paul Holdengräber, director of Live of the New York Public Library.

"We are doing this as a pair of co-conspirators," said Holdengräber as the duo introduced the film. The choice of screening "The White Diamond" had to do entirely with the film's soundtrack, written and recorded before the film had been shot save for the ending track.

"It's very hard to speak, to verbalize about music," said Herzog. "Though I do stage opera once in a while, I do it quite well." The statement elicited laughter from the crowd,...

Werner Herzog is personally participating in two events in New York this week, beginning tonight with Paul Holdengräber's Live from the New York Public Library conversation series and again with Holdengräber tomorrow at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a post-screening discussion of Herzog's use of music in The White Diamond and beyond. Screenings of Fitzcarraldo Friday night fill out Bam's duet of a series, Ode to the Dawn of Man: Film and Music with Werner Herzog. In addition, Herzog's video installation in the Whitney Biennial goes on display Thursday incorporating footage he filmed during an improvisation between cello and organ (here is a spellbinding clip of some of the footage from that session). Truly, 'tis the season in New York to contemplate the director's transformation of the world into music.

Herzog's knack for fusing his own astonishing images to somehow equally astonishing music has always been exceptional, to the...

Telluride 2011, Day 2

The most perilous and difficult aspect of attending Telluride – whether you’re a passholder, a guest, a sponsor, or a ticketholder – is going to the bathroom. Really. Because the great majority of the fest’s venues are assembled specifically for the event, some of its facilities are ill-equipped to deal with hundreds of rabid moviegoers who’ve been specifically instructed to stay hydrated to stave off altitude sickness. As a result, the lines are long – but as the fest’s employees are quick to reiterate, waiting in line is the second-greatest thing to do here. That’s not spin: because there seems to be no such animal as a casual Telluride-goer, nearly every attendee has a story to tell, a great movie to recommend, or a questionable opinion they feel very strongly about.

On the subject of non-casual entites, Today’s Symposium schedule included two potentially incredible speakers: Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog has forever been a maverick of modern cinema and certainly never one to work within the constraints of the so-called ‘normal cinema’. A man who would rather forge his own path straight up the middle of the rock face of filmmaking, ignoring the easier Sherpa led routes on either side of that particular furrow.

Werner Herzog, the director of many classics of the left leaning art house cinema scene, including Aguirre The Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977). Not forgetting his most well known work Fitzcarraldo’ (1982) which emerged victorious from the epic struggles of which it was born, deep within the dark recesses of the Peruvian Jungle. It’s Herzog’s innate sense of persistence and drive which lends his films and Fitzcarraldo in particular a slight air of madness. You get the feeling that no matter what, Herzog’s projects will be finished...

by Steve Dollar

No less an intrepid globetrotter than Werner Herzog once declared that the most exotic culture in his death-defying travels was to be found in North America. Though I'd trace it back to William Eggleston's under-the-radar 1973 documentary Stranded in Canton, the genre that critic Jim Hoberman would later coin as "Americanarama" seemingly arose to prove Herzog's assertion. Between the late '70s of the director’s own Stroszek and into the '80s of Vernon, Florida, Stranger Than Paradise, Blue Velvet and Something Wild, all the hipper auteurs were, to varying degrees, taking detours into Waffle House Nation. Whether the tone was deadpan ironic, sideshow creepy or joyously phenomenological, these films nearly always relied on the perspective of a character in limbo, variously terrorized or liberated by the oddball milieu, even if the character was the filmmaker himself.

Shot during the holiday seasons of 1989-'90 and exhibited a year later,...

The fearless director's work is less predictable, more dangerous and more real than almost anything else in modern cinema

An alligator hit by a car lies squirming on a blood-smeared road outside New Orleans. It's terribly realistic, and there's nothing at the end of the film to say it was created with special effects – nor did I notice one of those declarations that no animals were hurt during the making of the film. What I did spot was a credit saying that Werner Herzog, the film's director, personally photographed the animal scenes in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans.

You wouldn't want to be an animal in a Herzog movie. Few of them seem to lack a scene of animal cruelty. In Aguirre, Wrath of God the crazed conquistador antihero, played by Klaus Kinski, tosses aside a monkey as if it were a banana skin. In Nosferatu the Vampyre,...

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski on the set of Cobra Verde Top Ten Werner Herzog Films

The films of Werner Herzog haunt that hazy corridor between dream and reality, where madness and the true nature of the universe lurk. They're surreal, but not by any of the boiler-plate attributes we associate with head-trip cinema. They're horrific, but never by cheap shocks. They're beautiful, but not in a painterly sense. Each one is a tone poem searching for both new images and what Herzog calls the "ecstatic truth," a blending of fact and fiction for a higher cause. There's a uniqueness to his films that's unforgettable.

I not only admire Herzog's films, I admire the man behind them. Herzog's fearlessness is fascinating. He's an artist who risks it all to get "the shot." Studio backlot shooting is not an option. His obsessive, nearly self-destructive need to film in the hottest of...

Presumably, Werner Herzog needs no introduction. Like an atmospheric phenomenon or a law of physics, the German filmmaker has been some kind of constant for over more than four decades of world cinema. That he continues to be a major presence in the world of film -- churning out both documentaries and narrative features with supernatural regularity - certainly speaks to his uncompromising nature. But it also speaks to his adaptability - the same guy who made deranged German jungle adventures with Klaus Kinski is now making deranged American cop flicks with Nicolas Cage.

With the upcoming DVD release of his striking, impossibly strange thriller "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," in which Michael Shannon plays an actor whose experiences with the far edge of civilization cause him to go mad and kill his mother with a sword, Herzog continues his exploration of the ways that myth and...

Actor and musician known as Bruno S, chosen by Werner Herzog to play social misfits in his films

Werner Herzog is a singular film director, drawn to bizarre characters and situations in strange surroundings, with a preoccupation with outsiders who refuse to conform to a limited social structure. So it was not surprising that he was drawn to Bruno Schleinstein, known and credited only as Bruno S, who has died of heart failure aged 78. Even if one had no idea of Bruno's history, one could not fail to sense that there was something extra-artistic in his performances in the title roles of the two films he made with Herzog: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle, 1974) and Stroszek (1977). With his jerky gestures, staccato speech and staring eyes, there seemed to be a thin line between the actor and the characters.

Bruno S, who never knew who his father was,...

The heart of 78-year-old actor, painter and musician Bruno Schleinstein has failed him, reports the German Press Agency. From the Wikipedia entry: "Schleinstein was spotted by director Werner Herzog in the documentary Bruno der Schwarze - Es blies ein Jäger wohl in sein Horn (1970). Herzog promptly cast Schleinstein (under the name Bruno S.) as his lead actor in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), though he had no acting experience. Schleinstein also starred in Stroszek (1977), which Herzog wrote especially for him in four days. Stroszek has a number of biographical details from Schleinstein's life, including the use of his own flat as the home of Bruno Stroszek. He also plays his own instruments." The entry links to some of Schleinstein's drawings and Polaroids.

Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Kaspar Hauser: "Despite its fiction there is a reality that underlines the film's every scene. This...

Robert here, back with another entry in my series on great contemporary directors. For the second time in a month, I'm thinking of a director whose career started back in the 70's (actually earlier, but it took off in the 70's).  As always, since our interest here is in the importance of these maestros to modern cinema, I'll try and keep the discussion to the past ten years (or so).

Maestro: Werner Herzog

Known For: Movies about madness, movies with Klaus Kinski, and his own bizarre behavior.

Influences: Murnau, obviously. Also Bunuel, Kurosawa, many of the great old ones.

Masterpieces: We'll go all the way back to the old days for these starting with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, including Stroszek and arriving at Grizzly Man.

Disasters: If only I'd seen enough of his movies to answer this accurately, but alas availability issues arise.  No big disasters by my watch.