Berlin Review: Werner Herzog's 'Queen Of The Desert' Starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Robert Pattinson, And More

After that lost, long weekend of lucid dreams and crumbling sanity spent rewatching half his catalogue for our Werner Herzog Retrospective, I might have made some pronouncement like: Werner Herzog may have made a few bad films, but he has never made an uninteresting one. He comes damn close, however, with "Queen of the Desert," which does not deserve the outright trashing that can be felt brewing in the Berlinale air, but also can't be classed as anything other than a disappointment. Because it's not even the sort of bad that makes "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" such a gonzo blast — depressingly, it turns out that not everything is transformed into screams and alligators and the dancing souls of the dead by looking at it through Herzog's eyes. The notoriously stodgy historical biopic genre looks largely as self-serious and surface and inert as it does via Herzog as it would through any old journeyman's perspective.

Gertrude Bell, fearlessly and...