"One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work."
— Vincent Canby, The New York Times
"Les Blank's Burden of Dreams is one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening."
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"Herzog’s singular vision and Blank’s brilliant capturing of that obsession seem especially worthy of consideration from the adventure film lovers who stay up late."
— Alison Foreman, IndieWire
"Blank created an enduring record of hubris, exploitation and unrelenting misadventure in the pursuit of artistic greatness, all ideally symbolized in both films’ central image—fashioned from mud, sweat and timber—of a huge boat being hauled over a mountain."
— Zachary Barnes, Wall Street Journal
"Burden of Dreams would stand on its own as a 'how-the-film- was-made' documentary and as an inquiry into the strange nature of film as the most collective of art forms. Fortunately for Blank and for us, the film that Herzog wound up finishing, Fitzcarraldo, is a triumph artistically as well as logistically."
— Bill Cosford, Miami Herald
"Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle."
— Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club
