Queen of the Desert

Nicole Kidman, James Franco, and Robert Pattinson star in “Herzog’s feminist version of Lawrence of Arabia” (Independent), one of the great director’s most star-powered yet little-seen works. Kidman breathes life into the remarkable story of Gertrude Bell, a T. E. Lawrence contemporary who abandoned English high society to become an archeologist and political specialist of the Arab world (she even helped partition the Middle East after World War I and was advisor to the rulers of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan). Herzog dutifully dotes on his stars, but even more on nature (as always). “Here the desert is also an inner landscape,” he noted. “The landscape of the soul.”