For Fans of Werner Herzog

Klaus Kinski does not play Aguirre. He becomes him. The entire enterprise, making the film itself in the actual Amazon with a cast and crew pushed to the limit, mirrors exactly what it depicts: a man of terrifying conviction dragging others into an undertaking that cannot succeed. Herzog shot it in three weeks on a fraction of nothing. Every shot of the raft spinning on the current, every monkey, every corpse in the fog, is real. That is the only way to make a film about a man who has lost the ability to distinguish between vision and fact.

Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers living among grizzlies in Katmai, Alaska, filming himself. He was killed by one in 2003. Herzog's film uses Treadwell's own footage and reaches a conclusion Treadwell would have hated: the bears do not love him back. They are not sentient companions. They are animals, and nature is not kind or cruel, it is indifferent. This disagreement between filmmaker and subject, conducted entirely through editing, is one of the most honest things in documentary cinema.

They actually moved the boat over the mountain. No CGI, no model, no cut to something smaller. A full-scale 320-ton steamship was hauled over a muddy ridge in Peru because Herzog and his producer Walter Salles believed that if the audience could see the strain in the ropes, the film would mean something that a trick could not provide. Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, is as gripping as the film itself and possibly more honest about what the project cost.

A detective who has drunk himself into amnesia, in a city built on ideological rubble, being narrated by his own failing body and screaming subconscious. Disco Elysium treats political collapse, addiction, and self-destruction with the same unsentimental clarity Herzog brings to his most damaged subjects. The game does not ask you to succeed. It asks what you believe in when everything else is gone. Herzog would approve.