Woyzeck contains two or three epiphanies involving … [Woyzeck and Marie], and two or three epiphanies is more than you get from all but a handful of film artists in the world. As in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the epiphanies come at the beginning and the end. The problem, as always with Herzog, is in the middle where he is unable to create a cinematically dynamic narrative. Indeed, Herzog is as fragmentary in his ways as Georg Büchner, author of Woyzeck was in his. Moreover, Herzog displays little feeling for fiction, for archetype, for a representation of the world with its normal constituents. Herzog is instead the eccentric par excellence, searching out what differs most radically and most violently from the norm in order to express a more exalted level of consciousness.

Andrew Sarris, "Films in Focus: 'Woyzeck'," in The Village Voice (reprinted by permission of The Village...