Queen of the Desert Nicole Kidman, Damian Lewis, James Franco. Directed by Werner Herzog. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday at AMC Town Square; available April 14 on VOD.

Salt and Fire Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal. Directed by Werner Herzog. Not rated. Now available on VOD.

Prolific filmmaker Werner Herzog is one of the few directors equally well-known and acclaimed for his work in documentary and narrative film, but the two Herzog narrative movies finally being released in the U.S. this week, after long stretches on the festival circuit searching for distribution, prove that he might be better off sticking to documentaries at this point in his career. Both Queen of the Desert and Salt and Fire explore some of Herzog’s favorite themes, and they allow the director to shoot in harsh but beautiful natural environments, something he’s done for many of his most iconic films. But they’re both misfires from a storytelling standpoint, with Herzog (who wrote both screenplays in addition to directing) failing to craft characters or dialogue anywhere near as fascinating as the real-life subjects of his documentary work.

Queen of the Desert actually takes on a real-life subject, British explorer, writer, archaeologist and diplomat Gertrude Bell, although as a biography it’s less insightful than Bell’s Wikipedia entry. Nicole Kidman is the movie’s biggest asset as Gertrude, who rebelled against her staid early-20th-century upper-class English background and spent most of her adult life traveling the Middle East, learning from, documenting and advocating for the various native groups of the region. Bell is a hero for both feminists and Arabs (one of the few Westerners of the time period still regarded positively), but Herzog fails to give any sense of her motivation or connection to the place she devoted so much of her time to exploring.

Instead, he turns much of the movie into a gauzy, drippy romance, spending the entire first half-hour on Gertrude’s connection with diplomat Henry Cadogan (James Franco), for whom she pines the entire rest of the movie, even as she later has an unrequited love affair with a married military official (Damian Lewis). In both cases, the movie reduces Gertrude to a mooning, lovesick girl, and Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger use so much soft lighting that the movie sometimes looks like a jewelry commercial. Gertrude boldly ventured into hostile territory time and again over a period of decades, but her challenges and triumphs are equally unclear, and the movie barely delves into her political career before it ends, with its heroine literally riding off into the sunset.

Kidman’s performance smooths over some of the awkwardness of Herzog’s dialogue in Queen of the Desert, but none of the actors in Salt and Fire can conquer the absurdly overwrought writing. If Queen of the Desert sometimes feels like Herzog attempting to emulate bland, classical Hollywood filmmaking (complete with old-fashioned maps delineating characters’ travels), Salt and Fire is the filmmaker totally unhinged, a nearly stream-of-consciousness pseudo-philosophical treatise delivered by a cast who seem to have no idea what they are doing in the movie.

The plot involves a U.N.-affiliated science team, sent to an unnamed South American country to study something called “the Diablo Blanco disaster,” being kidnapped by a masked man who reveals himself as the CEO of an organization known only as the Consortium. But Matt Riley (Michael Shannon) doesn’t behave like a normal CEO, instead delivering long, ponderous monologues to captive German scientist Laura Somerfeld (Veronica Ferres). Eventually he drives Laura out to the middle of a desolate salt flat and abandons her along with two young blind boys, and by that time any semblance of suspense or political commentary is long gone. The camera constantly swoops around in the characters in a series of long takes, and the jarring score never lets up. The dialogue is written in a sort of rigid formality that completely defeats the actors, although it’s hard to tell if the performances are deliberately stilted or just bad.

At the same time, there’s a certain mesmerizing quality to a movie this nutso, and Herzog definitely knows nutso. It’s hard not to laugh at Gael Garcia Bernal complaining about “the mother of all diarrhea” or a character (played, randomly, by renowned physicist Lawrence Krauss) who’s spent the entire movie in a wheelchair suddenly standing up and declaring, “I only use the chair when I’m tired of life.” Queen of the Desert is a bigger disappointment because it’s too timid and bland to fit in with Herzog’s typically go-for-broke style. Salt and Fire might be a mess, but at least it’s memorable.