Two great films

Breaking and Entering (2007), dir. Anthony Minghella, cast includes Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, and Robin Wright Penn -- Oh, I am sitting here just after watching this marvelous film, moved in so many different ways it is very hard to describe. Look it up, find it, watch it. Immigrants, crime, love, autism, urban renewal, ...more.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans (2009), dir. Werner Herzog, Nicolas Cage is main character -- I guess they had to add the part of the title after the colon because there was another film, starring Harvey Keitel, also great, with the same name. Herzog is amazing, perhaps a lunatic, with extreme poetic vision. The film is like a poem, in that it shows rather than narrating a story, all imagery and emotion. The story is complex, fragmented, and so are the characters, especially Cage, who seems to splinter into shards but keeps going and going and going, ricocheting all over the place, coming out the other side intact. It reminds me of that TV series, "The Shield," done as a manic visual poem. Police corruption, prostitution, drugs, a dog, violence, comedy -- everything but the kitchen sink, set in New Orleans not long after Katrina tore it all to hell. Keep in mind, this is the guy who made Fitzcarraldo. This one is even better.