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Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who: “The Star Beast” and “Wild Blue Yonder”.

The Doctor is Back, complete with the face of the Tenth incarnation and that Doctor’s best companion, Donna Noble! However, as seen at the end of the second Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special “Wild Blue Yonder,” the Doctor and Donna aren’t coming back to the world as they left it. The joy of being reunited with Donna’s grandad Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) quickly melts away at the sight of a world gone mad: shopkeepers duking it out with their customers, carts exploding into flames, and an airplane falling from the sky.

That’s quite a setup for the third and final Doctor Who Anniversary Special, “The Giggle.” And while the special doesn’t come layered in the same amount of secrecy as “Wild Blue Yonder,” viewers may have some questions. Fortunately, we’re here to clear up any confusion,...

Roger Ebert once observed that Werner Herzog “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting,” that “even his failures are spectacular.” Ebert died in 2013, just before Herzog would start to prove him wrong.

“Salt and Fire” isn’t compromised or shameful, it isn’t always uninteresting, and it certainly isn’t made for pragmatic reasons, but there’s nothing the least bit spectacular about the filmmaker’s latest attempt to humble us before nature. Even the landscape feels mundane, as the dreamlike infinity of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni — the world’s largest salt flat — has already been commercialized by a zillion different car commercials. There’s no doubt that Herzog’s quixotic flair for adventure remains intact (his recent documentary work is proof enough of that), but it’s dispiriting all the same to see him boldly go where several Kias have gone before.

Of the Big Three new wavers of German cinema—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders-- who “came of age” as it were in the ‘70s, when I was in college and my own stake in the movies was budding into something more learned and substantial than what it was when I first discovered my love for them, Herzog has emerged as the director who most speaks to me now as an adult. I think that’s true at least in part because when his movies do speak to me it never feels like a one-sided conversation. I feel like I’m in there engaging in a push-pull with Herzog’s ability to seduce me (disarm me?) with his simplicity of approach, an ability which rarely seems satisfied to consider subjects from the less-perverse of two perspectives, and his tendency to rhapsodize and harangue and sidestep visual motifs...

Behind-the-scenes e-sports cross-media project follows pro-games stars such as sOs, Li “Sky” Xiofeng and Sophistie.

Beijing-based Oriental Companion Media has boarded French director Hervé Martin Delpierre’s feature documentary and web series, Game Fever,about the world of professional video gaming, otherwise known as e-sports.

It is among the first projects being put together by respected documentary producer Christine Le Goff following her recent arrival at Paris-based non-fiction specialist Zed Productions.

The €1.4m ($1.9m) project goes behind scenes of the burgeoning global e-sports scene in which professional video game players, or pro-gamers, compete for big cash prizes in online and venue-based tournaments.

It follows on from Delpierre’s 2013 Arte-produced Game Over about the evolution of the videogame scene.

“Thousands of spectators attend the live events and millions of people watch these competitions online,” said Le Goff. More than 1 billion people play the games worldwide.

Tickets for the 2013 final of a global tournament revolving around the multiplayer battle...

Craig here with the last ‘Take Three’. For this final, and slightly differently themed, entry I chose Brad Dourif, perhaps one of the finest character/supporting actors. Next week there will be a special wrap-up post for this third season of Take Three.

Take One: Dourif & Auteurs

The sign of a great character actor can often be seen in the directors they work with. Of course not all will be universally lauded names (character actors don’t get to pick and choose like A-list stars), but when they repeatedly work with filmmakers of high regard you know there’s something special about them. Dourif has worked with some of the most visionary and celebrated directors working. The likes of Werner Herzog and David Lynch, whose off-kilter approach perfectly chimes with Dourif’s, have cast him time and again. Herzog first cast him in the mountaineering-themed Scream of Stone (1991) which led...

Owf’s Rob Beames also reviewed the film at the Berlin Film Festival.

Through his documentaries Werner Herzog has dared to confront natural disasters first hand – such as the imminent eruption of a volcano (La Soufriere – Warten auf eine Unausweichlishe Katastrophe) or the flaming Kuwaitian Oil Fields (Lessons of Darkness). He has taken us on dare devil adventures – like the airship exploration of the rainforest canopy (The White Diamond) and the Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World). And he has even pondered quasi-sci-fi futuristic endeavours (The Wild Blue Yonder) – such as exploring new planets for humankind to prosper. Now he ventures where few people have ventured before to present to us “one of the great recent discoveries in the history of human culture”.

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog has gained exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France to glimpse at the oldest known...

Since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest this gifted bit-part actor has played the psychopath to perfection – but don't expect him to come out into the light in his new vampire movie Priest

Fans of the vampire apocalypse sub-genre will already be en route to the nachos, but no matter what your taste there is at least one reason to recommend the newly released Priest. That reason, buried as he usually is in the depths of the supporting cast, is Brad Dourif. Because I don't think it would be rash to claim Dourif as king of the character actors – champion of that noble tradition of bit-part players and background colour, a self-confessed "whore" who never fails to elevate even the dopiest hokum, psychotic creeps a speciality but capable of much, much more.

Almost everyone reading will, I imagine, have relished a Dourif performance at some point in their lives, in...

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski on the set of Cobra Verde Top Ten Werner Herzog Films

The films of Werner Herzog haunt that hazy corridor between dream and reality, where madness and the true nature of the universe lurk. They're surreal, but not by any of the boiler-plate attributes we associate with head-trip cinema. They're horrific, but never by cheap shocks. They're beautiful, but not in a painterly sense. Each one is a tone poem searching for both new images and what Herzog calls the "ecstatic truth," a blending of fact and fiction for a higher cause. There's a uniqueness to his films that's unforgettable.

I not only admire Herzog's films, I admire the man behind them. Herzog's fearlessness is fascinating. He's an artist who risks it all to get "the shot." Studio backlot shooting is not an option. His obsessive, nearly self-destructive need to film in the hottest of...

Madrid -- The 58th San Sebastian Festival will showcase contemporary non-fiction cinema in its thematic sidebar called .doc, organizers announced Monday as they unveiled this year's official poster.

Festival organizers said the retrospective will reflect "on the growing importance of the documentary genre throughout the world movie scene in recent years, the cycle will include some of the most representative examples of non-fiction cinema: auto-documentaries on individual and private subjects, essay cinema, fake documentaries, contributions from video-artists and moviemakers."

San Sebastian poster   The showcase will include films like: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007), "The Five Obstructions" (Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth, 2003), "Le souvenir d'un avenir" (Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon, 2001), "Auge/Maschine"-Parts 1, 2, 3 (Harun Farocki, 2002), "Los Rubios" (Albertina Carri, 2003) and "The Wild Blue Yonder" (Werner Herzog, 2005).

Organizers said the Official Section will run 15 features this year.

The festival's poster was revealed at an event in the city's Science Kutxaespacio Museum.

Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who...

Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who...

By Michael Atkinson

It was only a matter of time, after Werner Herzog used the under-the-ice Antarctic footage shot by scientists for his hodgepodge sci-fi meditation "The Wild Blue Yonder," until this most peripatetic of world-class filmmakers realized that the Poles may be the only patches of Earth he hasn't yet roamed through with his camera. Herzog's documentaries, from "Land of Silence and Darkness" (1971) to "Grizzly Man" (2005), are all subjective and full-disclosure, all the time; there is a reality in these films, but it is Herzog's, and that's why we're here. "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007) is perhaps more personal than most -- he does not propose any motive for his trip to Antarctica other than his own curiosity, and eventually becomes, by nature, impatient with the large science base he finds there, saying outright that he wants only to get out into the field and find something wondrous that isn't man-made.

Reviewed at the Venice International Film Festival

VENICE, Italy -- When Brad Dourif stares at the camera, as he does in Werner Herzog's science fiction fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder, and says, "I come from the outer reaches of Andromeda. I am an alien," you're inclined to believe him.

Herzog's strangely beautiful film, screened at the Venice International Film Festival in its Horizons sidebar, has marvelous music and hypnotic imagery. A documentary for stoners and people who are that way naturally, it is a cautionary tale for wishful thinkers. It should be a big hit on campus and also it's bound to garner support from the kind of deeply committed conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. government staged the moon landings.

Over 10 numbered chapters, beginning with 1. Requiem For a Dying Planet, Herzog relates the story of aliens who fled a planet far away in the wild blue yonder, hoping that Planet Earth would provide safe harbor.

Trouble is, as Dourif confesses, Aliens suck. The first thing they did was build a shopping mall in a place where two train lines crossed, intending to create a capital like Washington, D.C. But the shoppers never came, the new capital was never completed, and the mall stayed empty.

As Dourif, with great conviction and considerable humor, tells what happened, Herzog splices archived news sequences, interviews with scientists, NASA footage of astronauts on the Space Shuttle and some extraordinary film shot under what appears to be a polar ice-cap, to illustrate it.

Naturally, the UFO landing at Roswell is part of it and we hear all about theories of chaos transport and scientists' dreams of creating space stations where humans might live and work. Earth would be left to return to nature and be a place to visit, like a shopping mall, a prospect that understandably vexes the alien Dourif.

It's all handled with great dexterity and wit, and Herzog praises NASA in the credits for "its sense of poetry." It's a triumphant mix of great imagination, hypnotic images and an extraordinarily haunting score by Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger, with the voice of Senegalese soloist Mola Sylla and a five-man Sardinian shepherd choir, the Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei. The soundtrack is destined for great things.

THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, West Park Pictures, Tetra Media for BBC and France 2.

No MPAA rating. Running time 81 min.