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Hitting movie theaters this weekend:

Shame (limited) - Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale

Sleeping Beauty (limited) - Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

Movie of the Week

Sleeping Beauty

The Stars: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

The Plot: A haunting portrait of Lucy (Browning), a young university student drawn into a mysterious hidden world of unspoken desires.

The Buzz: This film’s trailer contained more than a few subtle hints that Sleeping Beauty was to enact some very sinister sexual episodes, and a very creepy/harsh vibe was diffused throughout. I saw the film a few weeks ago and found that it fully lived up to its advertising.

The film was thoroughly dark, and had somewhat of a male-hating bent to it — I suppose that’s why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d anticipated I would. There’s also a professed loathing of the wealthy therein,...

"Apples and oranges" was my off-the-cuff reply to a critic I admire as we rose from our seats following a screening of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He'd just muttered something to the effect of "sure beats Pina" and, while comparisons will be nearly impossible to resist — two giants of the New German Cinema have each made their first films in 3D, both of them documentaries, and, on that day in February, the Berlinale had just screened them back to back — I'm sticking with my initial verdict: apples and oranges.

Now Wim Wenders's Pina is playing in the UK and a few European countries, while Places, strange and quiet, an exhibition of nearly 40 large-scale photographs taken between 1983 and the present, is on view at Haunch of Venison in London through May 14 — the cover of the current issue of Sight & Sound, by the way, reads "The Third Coming...

Chicago – Where are the vital connections between our ancient ancestors and our creative, technological selves? Prehistoric cave drawings, the oldest ever discovered, are showcased in Werner Herzog’s new documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” The link between who they are and who are we becomes the theme of this remarkable exposition.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

Herzog, one of the most provocative and unusual living film artists, fashions a narrative zen state in this document, as his cameras lovingly express and pan across the primitive art. The narration is spare, and when enhanced by talking heads only strives to provide the basic information to appreciate the images on there own, and then is shown again and again.

For over 20,000 years, Chauvet Caves in Southern France had been sealed by a fallen rock face, its football field size interior preserved and untouched. In 1994, a team of scientists, led by Jean-Marie Chauvet, found the cave by...

Rating: 4.5/5

Writers: Werner Herzog, Judith Thurman (article)

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is a new piece of filmmaking examining the recently discovered - and strictly preserved - Chauvet Cave in France, and is directed by Werner Herzog: a visionary renowned for his love of uncovering the unknown. Herzog, whose prior left-field works include Encounters At The End Of The World and Grizzly Man, personally approached the French culture minister, Frederic Mitterand, who authorized unprecedented (yet severely restricted access) to the rapturous Chauvet Cave, where Paleolithic drawings of a multitude of mammals have been left untouched for up to 32,000 years.

Read more on Theatrical Review: Cave Of Forgotten Dreams...

Once he put his actors through hell, but now the German master Werner Herzog has travelled back in time for what might be his most moving film

On 13 December 1994, on a cliff face in the Ardèche gorge in the south of France, three speleologists first felt a slight draught of air coming from the rocks. They pulled them away and crawled into a space barely wide enough for the human body. Descending a steep shaft, they found themselves in a vast underground cavern of astonishing beauty.

But nothing prepared them for what they saw next. As they advanced into the 400m-long chamber, one of the three, Eliade Brunel, suddenly let out a cry. She said later: "Our light flashed on to a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a semi-circle of dots which seemed to emerge from its muzzle like drops of blood, a rhinoceros … We saw human hands,...