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STROSZEK

Werner Herzog West Germany, 1977
Herzog of course is no stranger to films about psychosis and the manner in which a natural environment both creates and reflects the individual's state of mind, but he forgoes his peripatetic style in this film; indeed, no road movie has ever seemed so static. Herzog trains his camera on vistas of nothing, taking in a temperate midwestern chill that is neither warm nor cold, as if even the weather feels it has no chance to be something in this kind of place.
April 2, 2015
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The Berliner Mauer in the heartland is a patch of land guarded by rival tractors with shotguns, there's little difference for the outcasts, the blunt degradation back home is here doled out "politely, with a smile." And yet there's genuinely beguiled affection from Herzog toward these oddball Americans and their ribald limericks and auctioning lingo, so much so that the story can't resist ending like a western, cowboy hat and barbershop robbery and all.
December 29, 2015
PopOptiq
Due to this normality... it basically stands alone in Herzog's oeuvre. But this is Werner Herzog, and under this facade of ordinariness he reveals the everyday mysteries and peculiarities that make a mundane Wisconsin town in the late 1970s as alien as the Peruvian jungle and as contemporarily incongruous as 18th century Bavaria. And our heroes, this motley trio of pleasant outcasts, emerge to be as fascinating and as emotionally engaging as any of the mesmerizing individuals Herzog has filmed.
August 19, 2014
The last fifteen minutes of Stroszek are like a demented version of Bonnie and Clyde: Bruno and his senile neighbor become idiots on the run, robbing a barber for petty cash before fleeing next door to spend their spoils. The neighbor ends up arrested. Bruno ends up dead by his own hand. Werner Herzog brings this comic tragedy to a close with a shot of farm animals performing tricks for quarters—a duck that bangs a drum, a dancing chicken. It's inexplicable. It's also devastating.
May 27, 2014
Ferdy on Films
Whenever you go into a Herzog film, expect the unexpected. The idiosyncratic director with a taste for the grotesque never does anything by half, and frequently inflicts the same fate on his characters. Stroszek comes close to defining the word "offbeat" while still clinging to a fairly linear plot and recognizable characters. In fact, his characters are played by nonactors and many play themselves in a film that spans from Berlin to serial killer Ed Gein's hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
May 2, 2007
Very documentary-like in style, Stroszek is one of Herzog's most natural features, and is certainly one of his strongest.
November 5, 2006
I am forced to conclude that Herzog is more than a mere humanist, and that there is some subterranean structure in his work that makes his great moments move us, sometimes against our will, to smiles and tears. Stroszek is a continually fascinating film, but both blessed and cursed by the extraordinary originality of its creator.
August 1, 1977