Poché Pictures

Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream looks like an environmental protest movie—but by the time you realize you’ve been coaxed into a “mythical dreamtime vs. corporate greed” séance, you’re already halfway hypnotized by the heat waves rising off the red dirt. It’s a film that’s equal parts awkward courtroom drama, philosophical landscape painting, and … Read More ““Where the Green Ants Dream” (1984) – A Wild Ride Through Cultural Collisions, Sand, and One Man’s Existential GPS Malfunction” »

Let’s get this out of the way early: Stroszek is not a movie. Stroszek is a nervous breakdown set to polka music, performed by real people who look like they wandered onto the set from a nicotine-stained bus station and were too polite to leave. Directed by Werner Herzog in 1977, the film is an … Read More ““Stroszek” (1977): The American Dream, Stuffed in a Shopping Cart and Set on Fire” »

If God ever wanted to remind us that Earth is still under warranty, he’d point to volcanoes. Big, smoking, geological ulcers where the planet belches its dissatisfaction with our stupidity. And who better to translate those sulfur-scented sighs of doom than Werner Herzog—a man whose voice sounds like a dying cathedral and whose outlook on … Read More “Into the Inferno (2016): Werner Herzog Takes a Date with the Devil and Brings a Camera” »

Werner Herzog, the patron saint of staring into the abyss until it cries uncle, once dragged a steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon and filmed it just to prove life is pain and art is better when everyone’s miserable. So it only makes sense that in 2016, he turned his camera toward something truly … Read More “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016): Werner Herzog Gets an Internet Connection and Immediately Regrets It” »

When Werner Herzog makes a documentary, it doesn’t merely “examine” a topic—it dissects it with the solemnity of a funeral and the curiosity of a cat poking a loaded mousetrap. And in Into the Abyss, he trades the jungles and mountains of madness for something far more terrifying: the American prison system, specifically death row … Read More “Into the Abyss (2011): Werner Herzog Stares into the Death Chamber, and the Death Chamber Blinks First” »

Let me introduce you to a place where the sun mocks you for three hours a day, the mosquitoes are thick enough to be considered a food group, and the only neighborly visit you’ll get is from a bear sizing you up like you’re a honey-glazed donut. Welcome to the Taiga. Siberia’s unforgiving, snow-choked expanse, … Read More “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) – Werner Herzog’s Winter Wonderland of Mosquitoes, Misery, and Manhood” »

There are films that respect the laws of gravity, morality, and common decency—and then there’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a cinematic fever dream that snorts a line of coke off the dashboard, laughs like a hyena, and asks, “What if God were a lizard?” Werner Herzog directed this thing. Nicolas Cage starred … Read More “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009): Herzog, Cage, and the Iguana Apocalypse” »

If you asked Werner Herzog to make a feel-good war movie, he’d probably set your rice paddy on fire, feed you tree bark, and cast Christian Bale to scream at the jungle for two hours while losing 50 pounds of sanity. And yet, Rescue Dawn is probably as close as Herzog gets to a “mainstream” … Read More “Rescue Dawn (2006): Napalm, Noodles, and the Man Who Refused to Die” »

There’s a certain kind of man who believes that if he just stares deeply enough into the eyes of a wild animal, he’ll find his own soul staring back. Timothy Treadwell was that man—a bleach-blonde Peter Pan with a camcorder and a death wish, whispering sweet nothings to 1,200-pound apex predators like he was trying … Read More “Grizzly Man (2005): A Bear-Hug of Madness and Majesty” »

Werner Herzog is the kind of man who could narrate a sunrise and make it feel like the final chapter of a doomed civilization. So when Wheel of Time opens with shots of thousands of Tibetan pilgrims crawling across sharp gravel to reach Bodh Gaya—the Buddhist equivalent of Mecca—it doesn’t feel like a moment of … Read More “Wheel of Time (2003): Werner Herzog Takes a Spiritual Detour and Still Finds a Way to Stare Into the Abyss” »