Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's an abomination to feature "reviews" by philistines who clearly have no more familiarity with films of distinction than mountain boars have with haute cuisine, which, of course, is wasted on them. They are like the ignorant savages who threw shade on Picasso because his revolutionary deconstruction of faces and figures violated their slavish and unimaginative devotion to representational art. Their obtuseness in the face of an artist like Herzog would not be lessened by my or anyone's efforts to enlighten them here. They are no doubt sealed in their benighted pits of uncomprehending intellectual quicksand for the remainder of their sad, ludicrous lives on earth. Instead of proudly demonstrating their unabashed ignorance here, they would be better advised to slink off to populate over-ripe venues like Rotten Tomatos.

Its not uncommon for some movies to have a dull start but redeem themselves at some later point. Watching Salt and Fire was a lesson in keeping expectations low with the understanding that bad starts can get even worse as a film progresses. The movie was generally disrespectful of any regard for the viewer's time and was painstaking in both its progression and revelation of the plot. It was nothing more than a brief bout of insomnia that kept me watching. OK, I'll be honest; I was also curious as to whether the entire movie was as dull as start. The acting was poor; detrimentally so to the career actors and no less damaging to the aspiring ones. Perhaps the worst of the lot was the character played by Krauss. It felt almost as if Laurence's agent begged for him to somehow have a role in some movie, any movie. The role, the character, totally mind-boggling, ultimately nonsensical but undoubtedly befitting the man himself. You need to be both patient and curious to watch this. You need to not have regrets over 98 minutes of your life being lost as this was a choice you made. How, or more importantly, why, such films are made are questions which linger in my head. The budget could have been better spent making public service advertisements.

I'm a Michael Shannon fan. He has been in some unusual movies, so I'm willing to go along for the ride. This one, however, did not take me anywhere. I kept waiting for the movie to reveal something that would make it worth the suspense, especially since Shannon's character kept telling the captive scientist that it would all fall into place. One thing that didn't make sense to me was: if he was mad at a global corporation for destroying the planet, why not pick someone who had a hand in creating the problem? Why pick a person who was trying to fix the problem? Seems to me that if he had approached her at the airport and told her his beef, she'd have agreed with him. Beside, she didn't have it in her power to do anything to stop the corporate destruction. I gave it a 2 instead of a one, because I hate to say any movie is awful.

July 18, 2017, my house. Watching Netflix. The new Herzog offering is about volcanoes (duh!). The man is obsessed with rivers of water and rivers of fire. He loves the smell of sulphur. He must be Lucifer himself. Or he kinda wants to be. Whatever.The actress looks great for my age, but too much botox. The writing and acting are lethargic. They are listless, torpid, moribund...I think I put that quite well, didn't I? Anyway, the only thing new for me here is the actress. And she's old. It's the Herzog name. It's a terrible film, but it's like taking up smoking again just for one night, and puffing through a pack of Marlboro Lites. You can do it, because you believe it felt good once, and still believe it can feel good again, like attempted onanism in rush hour traffic when neither mind nor body is really willing. It's a stretch but if it's a really bad rush hour and the radio is broken and your cell charger is missing and your phone is dead and....so you keep trying until you cwm out of desperation, and boredom. That's what watching this film is like. If sleep is not an option (ie., as in the rush-hour-traffic metaphor above), then give this film a try. Mine this Neflick for all it's worth, with every flick of the wrist, its value increases, provided you can concentrate hard enough on, for example, the casting decisions as those relate to the lead actress's face and figure. And then rate it 8 stars, just because...your point-and-click finger kept slipping, again, and again, and again, and again... while you tried desperately to give it a passing grade (six stars and up)...and then accidentally, thoughtlessly submitted the l̶o̶a̶d̶, review with a dinky rating of five piddly stars.Oooopsie.