the audience applauded

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I've watched this film several times the music is haunting and Nickole Kidman is excilent in her portraile of Gertrude Bell plus it's a historical piece the way she understood the people their way of life and how Politics can muddy up life

It is ridiculous that this movie has a 5.7 rating. It is a very interesting and entertaining work based on the life of an incredible woman. I really can't get people who don't understand the difference between a MOVIE, that's main objective is to entertain and a DOCUMENTARY that is meant to inform. I enjoyed this movie and thought Werner Herzog's respect for the truth of Gertrude Bell and the region came across on screen. Nicole Kidman gives a fine performance as Bell. She comes across as an earnest, seeker of the truth of the region and it's people, much like a latter day, more civilized, female version of Sir Richard Burton. I liked Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence. It was a subtle performance and a scary one to take on, because Peter O' Toole, ya know? The rest of the cast is solid.Any movie set in the Middle East, done by a westerner, will suffer in comparison to 'Lawrence of Arabia' and Herzog does a good job of not trying to compete with spectacle, though the movie is beautifully shot. He focuses on the interaction between the people and Gertrude's attempts at romance. I didn't know anything about Bell before watching this movie. She was really a remarkable woman and I thank this film for bringing her story to life for a modern audience. If you're not the type to nitpick over whether or not the term 'a lot' was used at the turn of the 19th century and you like historic movies that prompt you to learn more about it's subject matter, you will enjoy 'Queen of the Desert'.

Film Review: "Queen of the Desert" (2015)Working with major Hollywood stars on a frequent basis since 2005 with directing Christian Bale through "Rescue Dawn" (2006), confronting Nicolas Cage with inner demons in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" (2009) and given the antagonist "The Zec" for Tom Cruise's interpreted character of "Jack Reacher" (2012), Director Werner Herzog collaborates with actress Nicole Kidman to make her a living goddess by using the chronicles of real-life character Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) to find poetic beginnings and a roundup ending for a passionate picture of a woman connecting to her inner state within nature. The director loses all the ongoing hooks and suspense twists in between, especially due to a miscast actor James Franco as Gertrude Bell's love-interest Henry Cadogan, leaving Nicole Kidman struggling through an early 2014 shooting period, which she, due to her professionalism and decades of filmmaking experience, resolved for herself by wrap time, leaving the much-more documentary solid director Werner Herzog with another unbalanced motion picture narration of missed opportunities.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

I can see why this movie wasn't a box office smash - it's not an adventure tale with battles and lots of excitement. This is a biopic of a brave British woman who explored the desert areas of what is now Syria Iraq Jordan etc in the early 1900s and got to know the tribes and later help draw up boundaries of the newly formed countries after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Her ill fated romances punctuate the story.Nicole Kidman convincingly plays a range of ages from 20s to I guess 40s. Robert Pattinson looks a bit goofy and out of place as TE Lawrence. But even more strangely cast is James Franco as an English civil servant. He whispers his dialog so his accent isn't terribly disastrous.The photography in the desert is quite stunning.Interesting.