Critics reviews

Herzog's first narrative feature in a decade is an embarrassment... [Invincible] aims for simplicity and innocence but comes off as simpleminded and naive... The sluggish pace, broken-backed storytelling and unspeakable dialogue leave the non-professional actors spooning like fish out of water.

Were it not shot in Herzog's usual rich colour, taking close account of the lighting styles fashionable in the period, [Invincible] might almost pass for a Thirties movie, an early talkie, as it is so charmingly presented in naive style, never once slipping out of character.

Easily the most traditional film of Werner Herzog’s career, Invincible is drunk on irony and Jewish folklore but lacks the existential wallop of the director’s masterful man-versus-earth collisions.

I can imagine a dozen ways in which [Invincible's] story could be told badly, but Herzog has fashioned it into a film of uncommon fascination, in which we often have no idea at all what could possibly happen next. There are countless movies about preludes to the Holocaust, but I can't think of one this innocent, direct and unblinking.

''Invincible'' is not just another parable about the evils of Nazism, but a broader allegory of history as show business... The movie's embittered vision of politics as entertainment may be old hat, but the metaphors it uses to dramatize its ideas cut much more deeply than most contemporary critiques of a political world corrupted by spin doctors, image consultants and pollsters.

[Invincible] needed more irony, subtlety and dramatic structure than Herzog brings to the material, and as a result, this potentially intriguing story winds up being dull and at times faintly silly.

It's difficult to be moved or even convinced by Invincible as a film of more than incidental pleasures... Ultimately Invincible is a film which presses familiar Herzog tropes into the service of a limpid and conventional historical fiction, when really what we demand of the director is to be mesmerised.