The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans. This drama by Werner Herzog has been variously described as a remake of and a sequel to Abel Ferrara's notorious Bad Lieutenant (1992), but in fact it's neither: taking over for Harvey Keitel, Nicolas Cage plays a different cop but with the same weakness for sex, drugs, and vigilante justice. Given the heavy Catholic themes of the original, this seemed like a strange project for Herzog, but it's really just an excuse to pump some production money into New Orleans and make a badass cop movie. After a family of five is massacred in a drug-turf dispute, Cage swings into action, though in his case this usually means shaking down suspects for whatever drugs he can snort in his car. The tragic moment that motivates him is heartbreaking: next to the body of a little girl, he finds a glass of water containing an exotic fish and a scrap of looseleaf with the child's poem: "My friend is a fish / His fin is a cloud / He see me when I sleep." But at some point Herzog and Cage must have decided to play this one for laughs: the director is particularly fascinated by the reptiles (snakes, alligators, iguanas) that are part of the landscape in N'awlins, and Cage, stoop-shouldered from a back injury and saucer-eyed from his chemical intake, is flat-out hilarious. He hasn't been this good since Raising Arizona.