Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Brian Tallerico ★★★½ 3

  Of course, Herzog’s best narrative film in a decade would be this experimental.

• 

  Review by Jack ★★★★

  Werner Herzog is, in my eyes, cinema’s most fascinating filmmaker. He consistently crafts absorbing true to life stories that ponder on the many questions of human existence, and his latest, Family Romance LLC, is no different. It’s an utterly moving exploration of Japan’s “rent a family” business with Herzog also touching on his many fascinations regarding celebrity culture, artificial intelligence, and spirituality. An incredibly beautiful film that blends fiction and reality so seamlessly. It’s his best feature in years and one of the very best films 2020 has to offer.

• 

  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★ 5

  Werner Herzog going purely experimental for a simple narrative - yet there's a great testament to his own dedication for the medium, capturing something that's supposedly "real" but also constructed at the same time.

  Family Romance, LLC doesn't have the best acting or editing techniques, but there's something so pure about the fact that Herzog just continuously pushes through. It's a film that carries a charm from how you noticed that artificiality, but the sentimental nature which he takes upon in here still brings you closer as Herzog creates something more beautiful.

  But it's hard enough for me to really classify this as a documentary or a narrative - either way, I think it's safe to say we don't deserve Werner Herzog.

• 

  Review by WraithApe ★★★½ 4

  You'd be forgiven for thinking Werner Herzog's latest docudrama was pure mockumentary, but as far as I can tell from a quick Google search, Ishii Yuichi is a real guy and his rent-a-stranger business, Family Romance, is a going concern. The idea of renting out actors to play relatives or acquaintances in peoples' everyday lives - husbands, wives, fathers, co-workers etc - is bizarre on the face of it, but it's a real phenomena that also featured in the BBC's recent two-part travelogue, Japan with Sue Perkins. I was struck by the similarity between that and Herzog's film (basically the same setup, with a rental wife instead of a father, and the same robotic hotel attendants). I assume the similarities…

• 

  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★½ 1

  Family Romance, LLC is an odd piece of docufiction. It's scripted and has a story, but it's also like a documentary, kind of. It looks at the industry of renting people to be a part of a life for a small time. Whilst this may seem bizarre, I think we underestimate the ease at which we can lie to ourselves and indulge in fantasies and pretence. This service allows people to reconnect with relatives, have family at their wedding, pretend they win the lottery, have someone take the blame at work, pretend to be famous, or indeed do almost anything than a hired actor can provide. Herzog's film is neither fake nor real, it exists in a strange space which…

• 

  Review by Doug Dillaman ★★★★

  When a noted auteur winds up as a "special selection" at Cannes, instead of competition, one might take caution; when it's one whose track record over the last decade has been as bumpy as Herzog, one might take double caution; when it's a film that's repeatedly described as having unfolded quite quickly, triple caution would be in order.

  So let's get the faults out of the way first. This film is absurdly technically shoddy. I couldn't believe the cameraman was allowed to see out the shoot despite obviously knowing nothing about basics like ND filters, until I learned in the credits that the cameraman was Werner Herzog. (The fact that much of the film is shot during cherry blossom season…

• 

  Review by {Todd} ★★★½

  ”Sometimes, I wonder whether my own family might have been hired by someone.” -Yuichi,

  - Werner Herzog Ranked: boxd.it/3MAT6

  Keep on doing you Werner Herzog.

  In Herzog's newest film, a man is hired to pretend to be the father of a 12 year old girl. As the relationship develops it gets more complicated than a simple business exchange. I think I would be more weirded out by this concept if I hadn't already seen it presented in Yorgos' film Alps but the docudrama aspect of the film does bring more gravitas to the situation... and it is still pretty weird.

  Each new scene presets a new awkwardness, a new thing to reflect upon, or a new point in the development…

• 

  Review by cookie ★★★½

  funniest student film IVE ever seen

• 

  Review by Will Sloan

  Werner Herzog’s The 15:17 to Paris. An attempt at a back-to-basics creative rebirth by an almost irreparably memefied auteur that nevertheless contains a scene where a character wonders aloud if the robot servants in a robot hotel will ever have dreams. Self-financed with Mandalorian money, and with production values roughly on par with the early Matt Farley/Charles Roxburgh films.

  Herzog acted as his own cinematographer, presumably for reasons of both art and commerce, and I spent a lot of the movie wondering to what extent the clumsiness of its visual style was The Point. Herzog’s regular DP Peter Zeitlinger shot Abel Ferrara’s recent and similarly stripped-down Tommaso, which looked beautiful. Might have been nice to have had Zeitlinger around for this one, just…

• 

  Review by Jack Russo ★

  Not a fan at all, though that applies to all of Herzog's fictions from the past decade. He's conflicted by the honesty of forgery and the forgery of honesty. He wants the awkward embrace of reality that community television will present you, but then indulges in city-consuming drone shots that distance you from the facade of everyday. He casts the actual occupier of the many fake lives to recreate the false realities he has lived through, but then slaps a mawkish score on top that slices through the authenticity to forge an emotional connection that happens to be the literal occupation of its subject.

  But beyond the film itself there are a lot of really fucking weird reviews for this…

• 

  Review by Nick J ★★★★½

  It is very hard to see how another film, particularly in the next decade, will be as experimental as Family Romance, LLC with regards to the blurring between reality and fiction. It is a film that feels like a culmination, or at least a very big leap, in the doctrines of cinematic presentation of ‘ecstatic truth’ that Herzog has argued for his entire career.

  READ MORE ON CLAPPER

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★½

  In the land of simulacra. Herzog doing a late Wenders film. Some parts here are fascinating, the filmmaking is lazy by his standards.