A movie in the great tradition of grandiose cinematic visions. Like Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” or Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it is a quest film in which the hero’s quest is scarcely more mad than the filmmaker’s. Movies like this exist on a plane apart from ordinary films. There is a sense in which “Fitzcarraldo” is not altogether successful — it is too long, we could say, or too meandering — but it is still a film that I would not have missed for the world. — Roger Ebert