The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

Like Keitel, Cage is also struck by hallucinations, but instead of seeing Christ, he sees souls dancing and iguanas singing — Herzog has always had a liking for animism. Gradually, the staging, carried away by a camera floating like a poltergeist, shifts its focus away from the resolution of the investigation (into the massacre of a Senegalese family) to linger on what is swirling around the edges. A breach opens up and brings the Amazonian jungle into the heart of the United States. Suddenly, it is Aguirre who arrives in post-9/11 America. The America of Bush and the Iraq War — heralding the coming era of the great buffoons. Of Katrina, too, which we do not see unfolding, but which we imagine galvanised by all the expressions of nature that Herzog has previously filmed (the rapids in Fitzcarraldo, the eruption of a volcano in La Soufrière, the man-eating bear in Grizzly Man...). Shaken by a near-trancelike state, Bad Lieutenant takes it all head on: American madness drenched by decades of ultra-liberalism and the perilous filmography of a filmmaker-adventurer. (Antoine du Jeu; lesinrocks.com)