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Canada, United States, France · 2010
Rated G · 1h 30m
Director Werner Herzog
Starring Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste
Genre Documentary, Family
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Werner Herzog and a small crew are given access to the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, home to the oldest pictorial creations of humankind in our history. The documentary includes rare footage from inside the caves, as well as interviews with various experts detailing the significance of the cave pictures/paintings.
The paintings are extraordinary and the 3-D cinematography invites the viewer to get lost in every brushstroke. This is one of the few films to use the format for intellectual, even philosophical ends: the added depth parallels the deeper understanding of humanity that the paintings inspire.
A typically quixotic documentary in which great unknown artists from 35,000 years ago collaborate with one in 2011. Profound, mysterious and utterly absorbing.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is sometimes frozen by Herzog's awe. But it's hard not to love him for always trying to look beyond the surface of things, to find a common chord in the landscape of dreams.
For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.
Boxoffice Magazine by John P. McCarthy
With his (Herzog) idiosyncratic blend of serendipity, bluntness and mischievous irony, he's able to get at deep questions like no other documentarian.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams feels stuck in a middling zone of too much conjecture and not enough scholarship.
Filtering the world's oldest paintings through the latest in cinematic technology, Werner Herzog delivers a one-of-a-kind art-history lesson in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
To call this movie fascinating is akin to calling the Grand Canyon large.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
This truly intimate film invites viewers to commune as well and feel a profound living connection with fellow humans of 30,000 years ago.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Spellbinding.
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