Meeting Gorbachev

It’s been nearly four decades since Werner Herzog’s brilliant and disastrous movie Fitzcarraldo indelibly established the auteur’s reputation among history’s most “maniacally determined or admirably persevering” filmmakers (Los Angeles Times). But recently, the prolific director, who’s released seven films in the past five years (including last week’s premiere of Family Romance, LLC, at Cannes) has increasingly turned to the documentary form, usually in pursuit of subjects familiar from his fictional works: humanity and nature in extremis, on the edge of volcanoes (Into the Inferno), in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World), and in caverns containing the earliest drawings of humankind (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). By contrast, in his improbably warm new documentary, Meeting Gorbachev, Herzog seeks, over three conversations, the context of the Russian leader who, in six brief years, reversed the global arms race, ended Soviet control of Eastern Europe, reunified Germany, and oversaw the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union.