96% Cave of Forgotten Dreams

All Critics (107) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (103) | Rotten (4) | DVD (1)

It is our tour guide that makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams an often thrilling experience.

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

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is another lovely stanza in the epic poem of humanity that Herzog has been writing for half a century.

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.

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.

We're never going to be allowed in this place, so thanks, Werner, for inviting us along.

What you see in the film is awe-inspiring.

A hypnotic documentary that brings the incredible walls of the Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave to us as if we were standing 4 feet away from them.

With his deadpan delivery, heavy German accent and even heavier Germanic existentialism, Herzog has become one of the most welcome, preposterous and even funny figures in current cinema.

...the beauty of the pre-history artwork, available onscreen for want of any other alternative, is the wonder here, beyond film and ego.

What is cinema but shadows dancing on walls?

Art and history as seen through the eyes and mind of perhaps the most idiosyncratic filmmaker of all time.

They emerged with a film that is supposed to be an art documentary, but is really a kind of immersive fever dream and time machine.

Spectacular and absorbing,coinciding with the publication of Jean Auel's "The Land of Painted Caves."

Always the philosopher, Herzog is not content to simply document what is inside the cave. Rather, he uses the images as a launching point for a series of essentially unanswerable questions

A haunting, evocative work...the rare film about art that can be considered a serious work of art itself.

Herzog's glimpses of the future can be as otherworldly and singular as his perspective on the past.

We will likely never be able to see this amazing place in person. Thanks to Herzog for giving us the next best thing.

...equally intrigued by the prehistoric painters of yesteryear and those who study their work today.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams transcends all conventional applications of 3-D filming and projection to record the oldest show on earth.

[M]ay be the first absolutely essential 3D movie, one that you must see in 3D to appreciate its full potency...

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