Diagonaldi Very well executed

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

gavin6942 The foreman of a small village glassworks dies without revealing the secret to the famous "Ruby Glass".This is very much a Werner Herzog film. Although the plot itself is interesting, and allows us to see a small village collapse in on itself because f its failure to diversify its economy, it really is not about the plot at all. It is a collection of unusual characters -- and sometimes just strange faces -- that make up Herzog's world. Not having been to Germany, I can't say, but I suspect his view and the real world are very much in opposition! What lessons are we to draw from this film? I have no idea. I mean, you know, besides the idea that it's important to write things down in case of our untimely demise!

Robert J. Maxwell There is a scene near the beginning in which two men in peasant dress appropriate to a period around 1800 are sitting across a small table from each other in a silent ale house. One of the men looks a bit like Richard Boone; the other like a guy who runs a pawn shop. They stare at one another sullenly. Boone finally says, "I'll dance on your corpse." Time passes. Enough time for glaciers to advance and retreat. "No, you won't," says the pawn shop guy. Dynasties rise and fall. Boone picks up his beer glass and wordlessly smashes it over the other man's head. The Mesolithic Age comes and goes. The pawn shop guy, as if playing Laurel to Boone's Hardy, deliberately picks up his glass and empties it over Boone's head. The end. That's the whole scene.The story, to the extent that there is one, is about a one-factory village whose foreman has just died and been buried. He was the only man in town who knew the secret of making ruby red glass in the factory. The owner of the factory is despondent. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell because everybody seems beset with melancholy. At least those who can express any emotion at all. It's been claimed that the entire cast was under hypnosis during filming. I don't believe it, but I can believe Werner Herzog slipped some sort of synapse-fusing psychedelic substance into their beer steins and bratwurst because there seems to be an abundance of schizophrenic non sequiturs on display. At times it looks like the scenes in the "loony bin" in Val Lewton's "Bedlam." I understand some German but, aside from the factory owner, this was one weird dialect. I won't go on with this because there's either too little to go on or way too much.The production design is exquisite and so is the lighting and the photography, both indoors and outdoors. Everything looks slightly blue, icy, and damp under the remorseless clouds but it's all beautifully done. The compositions are flawless. Herzog has the eye of an old-fashioned painter, somebody on the order of Rembrandt.There is no musical score except source music played on period instruments -- something that resembles a harp and another that looks like a miniature concertina.There isn't much to say about the film except that it's just about the opposite of what you'd find in a ten-second television commercial. No noise, little action, lengthy static shots, and no attempt to sell any discernible message at all.In a way, the movie resembles Werner Herzog himself. If you haven't seen him interviewed, you really should. He's calm and self possessed. His accent is soothing, enthralling even. He doesn't laugh and doesn't show any expression of irritation. He's like a very very good shrink. Yet, what he says is sometimes insane. "Even the stars are crazy"?

Chad Beattie (bgnish_rv) Being a huge Herzog fan, normally loving all his films for the absurdity, I found this particular film being my least favorite. First of all, the plot is about the sacred ruby glass, in which the only person with the ability to make this infamous ruby glass dies without revealing the secret. You discover the plot within the first ten minutes, and it grows interest in you, but as the movie goes on, you drastically lose interest. As much potential as the plot had, it didn't really expand into all it was worth.To me, the plot didn't play an important role in the film. I was much more fascinated by the cast of the film, being hypnotized by Herzog (I'm still curious as to how Herzog hypnotized them.) It almost became hilarious during points of the movie. I found my mind sometimes wandering off the subtitles to focus on the minor characters in the background.Unlike other Herzog films, I didn't get much out of this one. Although it did have Herzog's favorite Man vs. Nature theme, I just couldn't take it for what it was. Of course, it did have some beautiful shots that could have been perfect if it wasn't for the horrible quality of the 16mm camera used. Not that I'm blaming Herzog for the lack of funds, just making a point.The whole atmosphere of the film was very "lynchian." The dialog, mostly. It was very obvious that David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Eraserhead) got a lot of inspiration from "Heart of Glass." In conclusion, I would ONLY recommend this movie to fans of Herzog (especially his older films: "Aquirre, the Wrath of God", "Even Dwarfs Started Small", etc) for the reason that they will understand it and get more out of it. However, to people who are unfamiliar with Herzog's older films, I would stay away from this one.

Graham Greene Heart of Glass begins with a scene of quiet contemplation, as the central protagonist sits alone on a rock overlooking a field of cattle, entranced by the pulsating sounds of the Scandinavian soundtrack and the sight of a thick, impenetrable fog that lingers across the screen. The pace of this scene, and of course, the pace of the proceeding film, is one of slow foreboding and persistent dread, as the filmmaker allows the images to run naturally, refusing to break the trance-like pace that is slowly being created between the subtle symbiosis of sound and vision. At this point, the voice over comes in, and the film cuts to a lengthy shot of a cascading waterfall that we, as an audience, are directed to stare into. Here, Herzog is inviting the audience, albeit, subjectively, to drift off into the same dreamlike state that is inhabited by his characters and indeed, enter into a hypnotic realm of woozy reflection and severe stylisation.It is important for Herzog to establish such a lethargic and entrancing mood at the beginning of the film, with the stylisations here used to convey to the audience the sense of blind obsession, entrancement, possession and greed. Around this central cinematic notion- as well as the basic plot - the film is further fleshed out by Herzog and his cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, who here creates some haunting and hypnotic compositions, which further compliment those bold stylisations and over-exaggerations (or indeed, under-exaggerations, depending on how you look at it) from Herzog and his performers. To some extent, the film is similar to von Trier's masterpiece Europa, with both films beginning with their director's using repetitive imagery and a powerful voice-over to captivate the audience, before leading them into this strange world in which the actors don't necessarily build characters, but rather, perform like rigid marionettes composed onto these lush, beautiful landscapes, all the while being controlled throughout by the director.The film is also quite similar to the work of Tarkovsky, with Herzog purposely drawing the film out, so that scenes unfold slowly, creating a dense and suffocating atmosphere that seems right for the story; whilst the use of philosophy, mysticism and the idea of dreams and visions isn't that far away from the ideas and ideologies of some of Tarkovsky's key films, for example, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. Of course, certain images - such as the (seemingly) mentally handicapped woman doing a random striptease on a tabletop, or the lethargic bar-fight that erupts from a moment of quiet contemplation - could have only come from the same man that gave us the treetop riverboat from Aguirre, or Stroszek's dancing chicken. However, there are many aspects of the film I don't quite understand, for example, the ending, with the surreal nature of the film and the mystical aspects of the plot making the whole thing quite impenetrable for the casual viewer. So, if you're looking for an easy way into Herzog's work... then this isn't it, and you'd be better off sticking to something like Aguirre The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaper Hauser or the acclaimed Fitzcaraldo.All we can be sure of with Heart of Glass is the bare bones of the plot, with the central character prophesising the town's downfall in his opening, hypnotising dream, before we move into the actual narrative, in which the town try desperately to figure out the correct method of creating ruby glass (which has been an integral part of the town's financial success for many generations). The only person who knows/knew how to create the glass was the town's elder, who dies at the start of the film, therefore leaving his son and his various cronies to tear the town apart in the hope of finding some hidden instructions that may or may not have been left lying around. As the town descends into slow hysteria, our central protagonist relocates to the mountains and has a vision of surreal potency - not entirely dissimilar to the vision at the end of The Enigma of Kasper Hauser - and the film ends there, with a question mark, as opposed to a full stop. As with most Herzog films, the final shot is absolutely gorgeous, and somehow makes us want to go back and re-watch the film and re-evaluate it further, in the hope of discovering more about it's elusive charms and stark ambiguities.Heart of Glass is, without question, Herzog's most demanding work... asking a great deal of patients and concentration from the audience, most of whom will be alienated by the film's lethargic pace and stark, stylistic diversions. However, despite these factors, the film still remains one of Herzog's defining moments - easily on a par with films like Strozseck, Signs of Life and Fata Morgana and possibly more integral than Nosferatu and the later Cobra Verde - with the director creating another poetic, dreamlike allegory about greed, trust, fate and obsession (making this film an obvious stylistic and theoretical close cousin to his masterworks Aguirre, Woyzeck and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser). Although it perhaps lacks some of the depth and emotional complexity of those works, it is without question, an enchanting film, which, despite it's alienating qualities and cinematic short comings, remains a haunting and hypnotic visual experience without equal.