Bradford Film Festival: Day 10 (Saturday 27th)

The violence in Rising is as shocking and disturbing as you've heard, with One Eye mercilessly despatching foes by any means. Winding Refn's use of the frame is just as filled with dread as unnerving long takes and sudden inserts of hellish dream sequences awash with red are backed by the sparse, droning musical score.

As a character, One Eye is an intriguing anti-hero, but Mads Mikkelsen is wasted in the role of a character that does nothing more than stay silent and look angry. Refn should well know - Refn's debut, Pusher, showcased a performance from Mikkelsen so nuanced and so charged that the film wouldn't have been the same without him.

It's true that the opening 20 minutes, in which One Eye escapes his captors and joins a band of Christian Vikings en route to fight in the Crusades, is the best part of the film. This tantalising set-up has wasted potential as they make a wrong turn, missing the Holy Land and instead heading for America, or what they perceive as a slow ascension into hell. A very slow ascension.

Stylistically, Valhalla Rising is an absolute triumph, looking like an aborted version of Terrence Malick's The New World in which the director had suddenly lost any love for the world. Story-wise, I'm not really sure what the aim of Valhalla Rising is, but I take from it an experience I've never taken from a film before and I recommend it for that alone.

2001: A Space Odyssey looked predictably fantastic on the big screen in 70mm print as part of the festival's Widescreen Weekend event. But what else is there to be said about the science fiction masterpiece that hasn't already been said?

Not much. You don't need me to tell you that the special effects are as convincing now as they were on 2001's release in 1968, that the score and cinematography are flawless, or that there are scenes here that have rightfully passed into celluloid legend. But I've gone and said it anyway because there aren't many films out there that deserve praise more.

Probably my most anticipated film of the festival, Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans was perhaps fittingly the last film I had scheduled to see at the Bradford Film Festival 2010. Why was I so looking forward to it? Two words: Nicolas Cage.

It had become a sad thing to see Cage languishing in low-grade action movies and tepid blockbusters in recent years - the man once daring enough to play a man drinking himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas had settled for mediocrity and an easy paycheque. This year, with the double whammy of Kick-Ass and Bad Lieutenant, he looked set to break that cycle. As drug-addicted 'bad' lieutenant Terence McDonagh, I can tell you that the Cage once so beloved by critics is back.

Procuring and taking cocaine and heroin at any opportunity possible, Cage's McDonagh is a whirlwind of manic excess. As in the original Bad Lieutenant, the vice-riddled cop's life is a mess with only one factor, the determination to solve a horrendous crime, driving him, but the main difference is this Bad Lieutenant is played mostly for laughs. Cage fully inhabits McDonagh and gives one of his best ever performances; it's certainly his funniest, delivering lines like "Do you think fish have dreams?" from behind a hysterical drug-haze.

The overall film isn't quite as exciting as Cage's performance, with Herzog making probably the most generic piece of work of his career. There are some hilariously quirky moments where the drug-crazed McDonagh starts hallucinating - at one point he imagines a pair of iguanas singing the blues - but the film mostly resembles a straightforward TV police procedural. Without Cage injecting such energy into Bad Lieutenant, there wouldn't be much of a film to recommend.

Still, it's an entertaining movie, if only really worth seeing for Nicolas Cage back on frenzied form. What unique vision Werner Herzog has sacrificed to make this film has given the 46 year-old actor a new lease of life as a performer.