TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) - Cinema's self-styled anthropologist, Werner Herzog, whose "Grizzly Man" emerged as one of 2005's more intriguing documentaries, returns with another unique travelogue.

"Encounters at the End of the World" finds Herzog accepting an invitation from the National Science Foundation to pay a visit to Antarctica's McMurdo Station, despite having warned them in advance that he's not at all inclined to make a penguin film.

Instead, he and cameraman Peter Zeitlinger are more concerned with the kind of people who'd be drawn to this desolate corner of the earth, and some of those subjects prove to be just as colorful and intriguing as the more exotic species swimming around beneath the ice.

While oddly shaped, the impressive-looking and sounding Discovery Channel release retains considerable entertainment value on the strength of Herzog's never-dull, very personal narrating style.

After doing some of the obligatory touristy things -- at least, what would pass for touristy in an industrial-looking compound that's home to more than 1,000 research-related personnel every October through February -- Herzog focuses on a sampling of those individuals and uncovers some subtle shared traits between them and the wildlife they're monitoring.

He also spends some time at an orientation program, where newcomers to McMurdo stumble around in the snow wearing buckets over their heads in a simulation of extreme blizzard conditions.

And, despite his initial anti-penguin stance, Herzog ultimately comes around, but only on his inimitable terms, asking an uncomfortable expert the tough questions about whether there were any gay penguins or if others were prone to madness.

Coming from the filmmaker who in the past has been drawn to individuals driven to building opera houses in the middle of the Peruvian jungle or out to prove that a Grizzly is man's best friend, nothing less would be expected.

Narrator: Werner Herzog.

Director: Werner Herzog; Producer: Henry Kaiser; Executive producers: Erik Nelson, Dave Harding, Phil Fairclough, Julian Hobbs; Director of photography: Peter Zeitlinger; Music: Henry Kaiser, David Lindley; Editor: Joe Bini.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter