Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The overall effect, aided by Ernst Reijseger's score of rising choral harmonies and lush strings, is rapturous.

To call "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" a great movie isn't just an understatement, it's a wildly inaccurate way to describe an experience that, in its immersive sensory pleasures and climactic journey of discovery, more closely resembles an ecstatic trance.

This is something more than a movie; it's a testament - and re-creation - of rapture.

Art history lessons don't get much better: "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" presents the world's oldest paintings captured by one of film's great visionaries.

What we get from this film: a specific and personal sense that 32,000-year-old artists, with all their ideas and passions, were not, fundamentally, that different from us.

Minor Herzog. Not until the final reel does it take flight the way his best pictures do.

Why shoot a documentary about cave paintings in 3D? Is Werner Herzog crazy? The answer to the second question has always been, "quite possibly," but the answer to the first becomes apparent the first time he trains his camera on the cave walls.

Even those who have found Herzog's work lacking in the past will have a hard time writing off Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It's a superb film.

Fascinating artworks by early man, sure, but they're let down by Herzog's long, rambling soliloquies about the history of homosapiens, albino crocodiles, and Baywatch... These sequences would have been right at home in a 45-minute IMAX film.

Another lovely stanza in the epic poem of humanity that Herzog has been writing for half a century.

Es indudable la capacidad del director por intentar, a través de la cámara, lo mismo que intentaron aquellos hombres y mujeres del Paleolítico unos 30.000 años atrás: comunicarse, expresar sentimientos y emociones, crear belleza.