;She was a very short, busy, go-getter kind of woman who didn’t take much nonsense.;

Norma, a single mom, was walking with her kids one night when she was arrested for trespassing on private property. The charges were later found to be baseless but she was deported anyway. Her 16-year-old daughter is now looking for a job to support the family. Norma’s 9-year-old son cries himself to sleep at night. Daniel, who fled Mexico in the 1990s to escape violence, was pulled over for a faulty exhaust system on his car and subsequently put into immigration detention. He had no criminal record and served as a community safety volunteer. Daniel’s 13-year-old son is pleading for […]

In general, there is no film genre today that is more likely to assure box office success (usually blockbuster status) than superhero films. I believe there are many reasons why today’s filmgoers enjoy escaping into a world where evil villains (often super-villains) are defeated by superheroes (however flawed) who do not need to do things “by the book” (i.e., wait on the slow-moving wheels of a bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt justice system). This is not the place to review those reasons.Imagine my surprise, then, when I watch a popular superhero film that seems to challenge the myth of redemptive violence […]

“For my family [cousins, aunts, and uncles] who live in rural areas, my coming to America was the same as if I had gone to Venus or Mars.”

Amid the superhero movies and raunchy comedies, the Cineplex occasionally sneaks in a quiet, “inspired by a true story” film. Such is Belle, which is based on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mabatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy admiral.Belle deals with the racism that existed then, and we view it with a self-righteous disdain for their backward ways. But it doesn’t confront us with our own racist structures today.

When I asked him why he was looking at me so weird, he said, “I was just wondering, if I were a stranger, whether I’d want to go out with you.”

On April 12 th of this year, approximately 40 people gathered around a white metal cross in Nogales, Mexico, close to the U.S. border fence. Eighteen months earlier, a 16-year-old boy named José Antonio Elena Rodriguez was killed by U.S. Border Patrol in that spot, the cross erected in his honor. Rodriquez was walking to meet his brother late one night in October 2013. He was shot multiple times through the fence by the U.S. Border Patrol, mostly in the back. Border Patrol claims he was throwing rocks, though witnesses on the Mexican side of the fence say he was […]

Director John Gray channels Russian novelist Dostoevsky’s ghost in his film The Immigrant. While the plot is relatively simple, the film is a portrayal of spiritual and psychological struggle.The story plays with clichés, like that of the innocent prostitute, but Cotillard’s performance and the screenplay mostly avoid this, so that the characters feel real.