9. 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans'

The criteria for whether you love or loathe this polarizing film are easy: Do you enjoy watching Nicolas Cage unhinged? I'm talking about "Vampire's Kiss"-eat-a-bug or Lynch's "Wild at Heart" unhinged, not the garbage he's been making since "Adaptation." If the answer's yes, the beautifully sleazy "Bad Lieutenant" offered the performance of the year. As dirty New Orleans cop Terence McDonagh, Cage chews, snorts, howls and eviscerates the screen, leaving you gasping, laughing and barely able to pick your jaw off the floor. McDonagh is addiction personified: Drugs, gambling, sex and obsessed with solving a grisly family murder in the ghetto. Much love to director Werner Herzog, who unleashes Cage in ways that recall his legendary work with nut job genius Klaus Kinski. The atmosphere, too, is typical Herzog, somewhere between brutal reality and a surreal, trippy dream (view the film a couple of times and ask yourself whether the last 20 minutes are set inside McDonagh's head). Like the jungles of "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo," steamy New Orleans here is Paradise Lost. The film is set post-Hurricane Katrina, and McDonagh's deteriorating mental state perfectly matches the eroding environment around him. He is akin to the numerous animals (snakes, iguanas, gators, sharks) Herzog fetishizes in the film: a lost beast trapped in a hellish landscape, bent on survival by any means necessary. People often say, "They don't make 'em like they used to." Well, Herzog has: His "Bad Lieutenant" whisks us back to the insane depravity of his New German Cinema of the 1970s, where often you left a theater needing a shower and a strong drink ... but smiling, "to the break of dawn, baby!" -- Dave McCoy