Herzog is the reigning champ of impossible real-life adventures undertaken in the name of cinema. And this masterpiece is the romantic flipside to Aguirre, the Wrath of God—a backbreaking epic that ecstatically treads the line between a portrait of madness and a genuine expression of obsession. Fitzcarraldo fictionalizes the mad, true-life mission of South American rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald to establish an opera house in the Peruvian jungle—which can only be accomplished by hauling a gigantic riverboat over a mountain. No special effects here—this is the real deal, with the impossible results executed before your eyes.