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You couldn't turn a corner in Telluride this year without hearing a festival manager or volunteer gushing thanks to the festival's many sponsors for continuing to support Telluride despite, to quote Charlie Kaufman, today's wintry economic climate. Telluride, a posh film industry mainstay, appeared to weather the storm: the $680 "Festival Passes" -- the most common, middle-of-the-road choice for Telluride pass-holders (passes run from around $300 to over $3000) -- didn't sell out for the first time in recent memory, but the festival was well-attended, the movies plentiful, and apart from the speech-making, the only sign of trouble was that Omaha Steaks provided flatiron instead of sirloin for the event's annual Labor Day picnic.

Some of the less entrenched film events apparently are not so lucky. The increasingly popular CineVegas, for example, recently announced a hiatus for 2010, so that regular attendees -- of whom Cinematical is one (or more) -- had better make other plans for next June. Part of the problem, as The Hollywood Reporter notes, is that unlike Telluride and a great many other film festivals, CineVegas is not a non-profit, which makes sponsorships harder to come by.

Still, though CineVegas may have been minor compared to Toronto, Sundance, etc., it was certainly a major regional player. Several of the lower-profile events with which I'm familiar -- the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, the Philadelphia Film Festival -- have gone ahead as planned this year. (The latter was affected by a feud among two major Philly film scene heavyweights, but that's neither here nor there.) The Hollywood Reporter article linked above notes a number of other events that have felt the pinch, though it only cites one other one -- the Jackson Hole Film Festival -- that was canceled entirely for budgetary reasons. How have festivals, repertory venues, and indie art houses fared in your neck of the woods?

Cinematical has just received these exclusive stills from Werner Herzog's kinda-sorta remake of Abel Ferrara's dirty, foul-mouthed 1992 film starring Harvey Keitel as a sick, sadistic, drug-addicted cop who's investigating the rape of a young nun. Updated for the "We'll Try Anything Twice" generation, Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans stars Nicolas Cage as our dirty, violent, sex-charged corrupt cop who's apparently in charge of investigating the killings of five Senegalese immigrants when he's not busy breaking the law in a variety of disgusting and distasteful ways.

The film, which screened at the Telluride Film Festival and is about to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, seems to be drawing a number of fascinating reactions from critics. Our own Eugene Novikov had this to say in his review: "If you're a fan of this genre, this could be your chance to watch a smart filmmaker take it in some strange and interesting directions; if you're not, this is your chance to watch a smart filmmaker make fun of it. If you've been following Nic Cage's increasingly intense scenery-chewing over the last couple years, this is your chance to see it taken to its logical conclusion and beyond. Herzog occasionally makes The Bad Lieutenant feel frivolous, but it's rarely less than fascinating."

Check out a bunch of exclusive images from the film below, and look for it to hit theaters later this year.

It's no secret that Nicolas Cage has been going off the deep end of late. His performances have become increasingly unhinged and harebrained; you never know when the character he's playing will suddenly become apoplectic over something that seems -- no matter what it is, in comparison to the reaction it draws -- relatively minor. This almost singlehandedly ruined this year's Knowing, at heart a decent science-fiction flick rendered nearly unwatchable by Cage's fevered overacting. It's no coincidence that Cage hasn't done a "serious" dramatic performance in more than three years. I shudder to think what that would now look like.

All of which makes me think that Werner Herzog is even smarter than people give him credit for. Having cast Cage in his "remake" of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (I put "remake" in scare quotes as Herzog claims to never have seen Ferrara's film, and the new one has nothing to do with it beyond sharing some bare plot elements), he lets the actor go truly all-out. In The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Cage, playing the titular Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, interrupts himself, has roundtable discussions with himself, cheers himself on, punctuates conversations with non sequitur chuckles and handclaps, and gets hugely angry. It's a completely absurd performance -- and, God willing, a way for the actor to let off steam and return to the more nuanced, settled acting he used to do.

Sometimes it seems like one of Hollywood's main goals is to make people without spouses and children feel really bad about themselves. If that sort of thing bothers you, I would recommend passing on Up in the Air, which is as strident about the notion that a life without a family is worthless as any movie I've ever seen. Fortunately, it is also brisk, funny, and not enslaved to genre conventions. Parts of the film, in fact, approach comic brilliance. The reason that the film's message-mongering doesn't grate, I think, is that we really do feel sorry for the protagonist – an obsessive frequent flier who begins to realize that his life is an empty, lonely shell of rationalizations and self-delusions.

In some respects, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) approaches caricature: not only is he wifeless, childless and practically homeless – he has a barren studio in Omaha and spends 320 days a year on the road – but he fires people for a living and occasionally gives motivational speeches urging people to "empty their backpacks" and rid themselves of commitment. But there's a kernel of truth to him, in the sense that there is something compelling, almost romantic about transience. His world of luxury hotels and airline perks – and a hot frequent flier girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) with whom he sleeps with when their paths cross but who asks for nothing more – actually seems kind of cool.

Once the novelty of the first-person, subjective-camera horror flicks (Blair Witch, Cloverfield, Quarantine, Diary of the Dead, etc,) wore off for me, I started having logistical issues with the genre. After a while, you can't help but start paying attention to the inherent implausibility of the characters as persistent, skilled camerapeople who keep rolling when any reasonable person would have ditched the damn camcorder long ago. That may seem insanely picky, but it's what happens when the same flawed device is foisted on me time and again.

I had some of the same objections to Paranormal Activity, which screened at Telluride in advance of a planned release by Paramount, and nearly two years after it first premiered at Screamfest in Los Angeles. But the movie is so skillful in every other way -- and so much fun -- that I essentially told myself to shut the hell up. Oren Peli's feature debut, the story of a woman haunted by a relentless and malevolent demon, is a terrific companion piece to this year's Drag Me to Hell, with Sam Raimi's old-fashioned horror chops replaced by the masterful execution of a conceptual gimmick.

Just before the kid was born, the world burned. We don't know why, and the characters don't talk about it -- perhaps they don't quite know themselves, or maybe they've decided that it no longer matters. The Boy's universe is grey, full of ash, dust, and the ruins of a civilization he never saw. This is all he knows. His mother, seeing no point in going on, killed herself shortly after his birth. She was not alone. Many of those who didn't take their own lives were soon murdered by the desperate and hungry.

Skip ahead nine or ten years. The kid and his father wander the barren roadways heading south toward the coast for no clear reason other than that it gives them a tangible goal toward which to strive. (And there's always the hope that the ocean will be something other than gray.) Every day is a knock-down, drag-out fight for survival. They run, hide, starve, and fight off attackers who want their food, or their clothes, or, at one point, their flesh.

I set the stage like this not to horrify you or to gross you out, but to give you a sense of the relentless, pervasive grimness of The Road -- and then to turn around and say that The Road may be the most profoundly optimistic and life-affirming film you will see this year. Those who have read Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name won't be surprised by this. John Hillcoat's faithful, near-perfect adaptation beautifully captures McCarthy's synthesis of all-encompassing darkness and enduring hope.

If you've ever been to a film festival, you know the age-old dilemma: do I opt for early sneaks of high-profile releases that will roll out all over the country in a few months, or do I try to catch the obscurities that I may never see again? For me, this choice is frequently dictated by reviewing obligations, but even when it is not, I tend to opt for the former, as I am both impatient and -- sadly -- skeptical of the unfamiliar. I don't know what happened to me at Telluride this year, but for some reason I decided to commit to a trilogy of films made for British television at the expense of several higher-profile options that I will now have to see when they hit theaters later this fall.

Let this be a lesson to you. Red Riding -- the trilogy to which I'm referring -- is, collectively, the greatest thing I've seen since I discovered the first season of Twin Peaks on DVD. Granted, featuring actors like Peter Mullan, Andrew Garfield, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine and Mark Addy, and directed by name-brand filmmakers Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker, this isn't some ultra-independent obscurity. But man, am I grateful for the Telluride powers-that-be for bringing it here, and for whatever possessed me to check out the first one on Saturday morning.

The only thing worse than the biopic – as a general rule my least favorite genre – is the biopic of someone to whom nothing interesting actually happens. Coco Before Chanel is astonishing in this respect. The title is perfectly clear: this is a movie about Coco Chanel before she became a fashion icon and built her Parisian empire. What this translates to in reality is a movie about a period in the title character's life during which nothing occurs. I've been sitting here trying to think of a more dramatically inert film than this one. I'm at a loss.

Look, I think it's wonderful that Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel revolutionized fashion, refused to surrender her independence, and eventually made a fortune. It's just that we don't see any of that here, at least not depicted in any compelling way. Coco Before Chanel is interesting, if at all, as a historical point of reference. If you've always wondered where Coco Chanel "came from," and would like to see her "roots" depicted by the numbers, the movie might work for you. But insight? Narrative drive? No.

Coco (Audrey Tautou) – so nicknamed because of a rowdy song she used to sing with her sister when the two were barmaids – worked as a tailor and tried to make it as an actress and singer. When that didn't work, she moved in with an aging millionaire playboy named Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), who was more than happy to provide for her handsomely in exchange for companionship and the occasional roll in the hay. Careful to avoid romantic commitments, Coco eventually also took up with a handsome Englishman (Alessandro Nivola), who was more solicitous of her creative pursuits (hatmaking, mostly) than Balsan. She dared design herself a dress sans corset. Eventually she moved to Paris, and the rest is history.

You may know Michael Haneke as the fiery, audience-disdaining provocateur of Funny Games – the subtitled original or the American shot-by-shot remake, no matter. And if so, you may understandably want to steer clear of further efforts by the filmmaker. After all, most sane people don't go to the movies to spend two hours getting yelled at by a crazy Austrian. Even Caché, which I actually thought was quite good, could feel awfully haughty -- like it was somehow above having a plot that's comprehensible on a literal level, without having to stretch for abstract explanations and metaphors.

The White Ribbon, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, has been described – and, in some circles, condemned – as a "departure" for Haneke. That's true. Though the film's dogged austerity and formal precision will be familiar to cinephiles, The White Ribbon features an honest-to-goodness story, one that works on its own terms and as a typically cynical allegory. Armed with a plot, Haneke's talents and style prove richly rewarding. This is one of the year's best films: a tense, foreboding creeper with devastating insight into human nature and why ordinary people sometimes do (or acquiesce to) some very bad things.

Circa 1910, Lev Tolstoy was the most renowned writer and thinker in Russia. The man was so worshipped that he spawned his own political and philosophical movement – Tolstoyanism – that won over scores of fanatically devoted adherents who followed Tolstoy in rejecting notions of private property, condemning sexual intercourse, and embracing what can be described as an idiosyncratic form of communism, with a somewhat creepy religious bent. "I don't believe that Tolstoy is Christ," says one particularly revolting character in The Last Station, a fictionalized chronicle of Tolstoy's last days. "Christ is Christ. But I believe that he is a prophet."

I've read enough Tolstoy to know that the guy was essentially a crackpot. The main problem with The Last Station is that the movie – which wants badly to portray the man as sympathetic – spends most of its running time madly equivocating on this score. Certainly its depiction of his politics does Tolstoy no favors: his worldview appears as illogical and fanatical as it apparently was in real life. At the urging of his advisors, the man robs his wife of 48 years of the rights to his bestsellers, which he is convinced "belong to the people." When asked why his family shouldn't profit from what is, after all, his work, he says that if peasants had money, they wouldn't spend it on footservants – to which his wife, Countess Sofia Andreevna Tolstoya, reasonably replies that they would probably spend it on liquor.