My Best Fiend

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The Polish-born actor Klaus Kinski was a born mesmerizer with a rock star's gift for mischief. To put it another way, the guy was nuts, and Herzog had to be a bit eccentric to keep casting him; the five films they made together turned their friendship into a holy war. Yet the combustion produced amazing adventures: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which Kinski goes berserk in the Peruvian rain forest, and Nosferatu the Vampire, with the actor as a pathetic, rodentoid Dracula. This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.