Invincible

The strange and briefly conjoined careers of Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart and mentalist Jan Erik Hanussen are both proof that truth is far stranger than any fiction. But in bringing their stories to the screen, Werner Herzog inexplicably opted for the latter. In his first theatrical feature in more than a decade, Herzog conflates the lives of these fascinating showmen to fashion a fable of assimilation, deception and Jewish identity on the eve of the Holocaust. By 1932, the year before Hitler's ascendancy to Germany's chancellorship, the real-life Breitbart (played here by Finnish weight-lifter Jouko Ahola) had already been dead seven years. But for purposes of p...