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With a blank-page disregard for Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult film also called “Bad Lieutenant” and its similar premise, Werner Herzog’s off-the-rails portrait of a drug-addicted cop in post-Katrina New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage in the feature role, borders on dark comedy with a joyous embrace of bleak absurdity. Cage’s bad, bad lieutenant ingests every ounce of dope he can get his bankrupt hands on while struggling to solve a horrendous multiple homicide, protecting his upscale hooker girlfriend from abusive johns, settling his gambling debts and making the most of his relationship with his alcoholic father. In a perpetual haze of drug-fueled oblivion, moral lines are drawn simply to be snorted up with glee. (“I snorted what I thought was coke but turned out to be heroin” is but one choice line.) Herzog’s balance between cop drama and subversive goof makes for fearless storytelling—the lieutenant’s proclivity for reprehensible behavior, taking advantage of his position of power, sends chills, and Herzog’s jaunts with iguanas and alligators are inspired. This is a hard-luck town that was once nearly all but forgotten. Nicolas Cage delivers one of the best performances of his career, offering exultation and frustration to those aware of the work of which he’s capable. The film’s finale offers a splurge of unexpected uplift that teases the soul. With Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Fairuza Balk, Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Michael Shannon and Shea Whigham, who somehow steals one scene away from Cage. 121m. (Tom Lynch)

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Mike Judge’s titles are pretty straightforward: “Office Space,” “Beavis and Butthead Do America,” “King of the Hill.” And his latest, the cheerily reprobate “Extract”? It’s his most basic yet. Even without its subplot of testicular endangerment, the writer-director distills all manner of dispirited maleness. Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) wants to sell the business he’s built from the ground up, hoping to rekindle his relationship with his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) and get away from supervising a factory floor packed with numbskulls. Confiding in best friend Dean (a bewigged Ben Affleck), Joel hatches a drink-and-drug-influenced plot to prove Suzie’s fidelity… right about the same time as short-shortsed, sociopathic con-artist Cindy (Mila Kunis) shows up. Think: a Texas “Trouble in Paradise” meets “Idiocracy.” More drink, more drugs, more deadpan conflict.  And Marriage misunderstandings, neighbors who are proprietary bores, young men who don’t get older women, middle-aged longing for the “new” one: men reduced to their crude essence. While seriously deadpan, “Extract” has passages that play with social discomfort to the point of hilarious agony, such as the neighbor from hell you’d like to see drop dead, played by David Koechner. Judge’s pacing may not be to every taste, but there are more than a few great laughs in “Extract.” Plus that ear he has for weird dialogue: a distracted doofus after a kiss has been refused at lakeside in moonlight: “Look at all them mallards. I knew I should’ve brought the Mossberg.” While Wiig is underused, Judge does make ample note of her very shapely legs. With Beth Grant, a restrained J K Simmons and a loathsome lawyer embodied by a slit-eyed, dead-eyed Gene Simmons. 91m.  (Ray Pride)

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Director Ang Lee trips lightly for gentle comedy on upstate New York counterculture. In 1969 the poster read: “Woodstock Music & Art Fair presents An Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, N.Y.; 3 Days of Peace & Music.” Longtime Ang collaborator James Shamus adapts the 2007 memoir “Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and A Life” by Elliot Tiber (with Tom Monte). The screenplay makes passing though telling mention of the Stonewall Inn riot and does not follow Tiber’s life after the so-called Woodstock Nation decamped. While Robert Altman could have made an ensemble docudrama about this communal, collective fest, Lee and Shamus center on Elliot Tiber (comedian Demetri Martin), a boyish tourism booster who offers his summer festival permit to Woodstock’s organizers. Read the rest of this entry »