BY BOB STRAUSS >FILM CRITIC

If you just have to see another Antarctica documentary, you could do worse than Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World."

Cinema's favorite German contrarian certainly does his own thing with the continent's vast stretches of snow and cathedral-like ice caves, not to mention the underwater world beneath the coastal ice sheet. But Herzog also seems to be hunting for something that isn't there. His voiceover narration is often obnoxious and ridiculous. It sounds like he wants to portray the scientists and support workers who spend the austral summer at McMurdo Station as loony on the level of the guy in his "Grizzly Man," when they're actually quite professional researchers who are mildly eccentric if at all.

Its tone notwithstanding, "Encounters" imparts a lot of great information from the various biologists, glaciologists, volcanologists and zoologists Herzog interviews. And even though he declares his refusal upfront to make another penguin movie, his camera eventually settles on a flock of the birds.

Characteristically, Herzog zeroes in on the craziest one.

>Bob Strauss

review>

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

>G

>Playing: Nuart, West L.A.