In the Border States

Sep 26, 2023 — In this vibrant, music-filled portrait of an artist and his community, director Luis Valdez gathers what little is known about rock-and-roll idol Ritchie Valens and fuses it with a lived-in understanding of what it is to be Chicano.

Jul 27, 2020 — The first shot of Atom Egoyan’s 1984 debut feature, Next of Kin, is a ground-level pan across the baggage claim section at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The camera is angled so that our gaze is on the various pieces of luggage...

Apr 5, 2018 — “Just a few years in and DOC10 is already a must-hit stop on the festival circuit for the year’s best documentaries,” writes Lisa Trifone in the Third Coast Review. “The brainchild of Chicago Media Project and head programmer Anthony Kaufman,...

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Sep 14, 2017 — New York. Tomorrow through Wednesday, the Metrograph presents new 35 mm prints of ten features and five shorts as the UCLA Festival of Preservation flies in from the left coast. In the Village Voice, Melissa Anderson previews Howard Alk’s “scalding...

Jan 14, 2009 — Gregory Nava, with his writing partner and producer, Anna Thomas, made the courageous decision to tell their story of a cold-war battleground from the point-of-view of the colonized “natives,” eschewing an English-speaking protagonist.

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Oct 22, 2007 — Through the alcohol-induced convulsive movements of Firmin, a fallen diplomat, John Huston puts what is perhaps his own fear of decline, of departure without making peace with one’s loved ones, on the screen.

Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...

Dec 17, 2020 — The year 1999 was several months old when I entered Los Guajolotes, a restaurant that, like so many others in Mexico City, has now disappeared. I was walking to my table when a person who appeared to live on the streets...