Encounters at the End of the World

Dana Stevens, at Slate, takes a look at Herzog's latest:

Werner Herzog is one of the earth's disappearing natural resources: a filmmaker of boundless energy, curiosity, and passion who for 45 years has pursued his craft at an indifferent remove from the bustle of awards ceremonies and box-office returns...

Herzog's driving obsession, in both his feature and documentary films, has always been the elusive boundary between nature and culture. He loves stories about implacable landscapes (the jungle, the desert, the oil fields of Kuwait) and the men who try—in vain but with an absurd nobility—to tame them...