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Want to see a strong documentary?  Kevin Knoblock’s Border War, from 2006, is it, for it skillfully presents its subject of the “border war” involving illegal immigrants from Mexico.  It concentrates on a number of participants in this war, most of them opponents of illegal entry and of such measures as a guest-worker program–e.g. former Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. 

Lupe Moreno, another participant, is a Latina activist against the illegals, she whose father, a migrant worker, helped Mexican family members and others emigrate to a “safe house” in California when Lupe was a little girl.  Lupe lived in the safe house and had a very hard time of it.  Her father’s doings drove Lupe’s mother to leave the man, and Lupe, unprotected, was sexually molested by the immigrants, all of whom were male.  What’s more, a nephew of hers was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

So was Teri March’s husband, a policeman.  A vicious, drug-dealing illegal shot Dave March to death and, at long last, was extradited to the U.S.  (Brutal, this, and even  more brutal was the 1994 murder of a 16-year-old girl in Texas at the hands of an illegal immigrant named Humberto Leal Garcia.  After raping the girl, Garcia crushed her skull with a 35-pound piece of asphalt.  He was FINALLY executed in 2011.)   The film’s resident defender of the illegals, Enrique Morones, correctly notes that most border-crossers do not belong to the criminal class (they’re often excellent workers) and explains their desperation to escape poverty.  Morones helps them with food and water, but, although he doesn’t want them to cross the border, he also glorifies them.  “They’re heroes,” he says.  Also featured  is a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Jose Maheda, who rightly comments that the illegals ought to be treated with respect after they’re apprehended.  He knows, however, they’re not actually heroic.  They’ve broken the law and they leave garbage all over the desert.  And they’re dependent on evil “coyotes,” i.e. men who smuggle immigrants into America for profit.

Knoblock isn’t on the side of the open-borders advocates.  He lets Morones speak his mind, but he knows the man’s assertions about illegal entry are worthless compared with what Moreno, Hayworth and a few others have to say.  I wish the film had spent a little time on the economic costs of massive immigration but it isn’t an analytical work and, withal, simply assumes the audience knows those costs are there.  And we do know it, do we not?  It is enough that Knoblock is alarmed by how many people are getting in.  An Arizona rancher tells Rep. Hayworth that he once asked a coyote, “How many [immigrants] make it through?”  The coyote answered, “They all make it through.”  Sounds unsustainable to me.

Border War is a dark conservative film which wholeheartedly wishes to persuade liberals and conservatives alike that what’s going on is important. . .

It is still relevant.

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The famous picture about two “cowboys” working with livestock who initiate a homosexual love affair in 1963, Brokeback Mountain (2005) tells us that sexual and emotional self-denial is an unfortunate, even a tragic, thing.  It’s wrong:  What it should be telling us that such self-denial CAN BE an unfortunate thing, not simply that it is.  Pretty simpleminded message.

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It never came to a Tulsa theatre, but 2007’s Broken English, which I saw on DVD, is a small triumph for director-writer Zoe Cassavetes.  Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) has no boyfriend.  She does have a fling, however, in her native New York City with a Frenchman, Julien (Melvil Poupaud).  It hurts her when he returns to Paris; indeed, Nora’s life is a vacuous mess.  Ergo she decides to fly to Paris with her best friend to try to find Julien, that is, to find a man she does not actually love.  She goes because she wants to love and to be loved.  On another level, she goes not to find Julien but herself.

The film has to do with the drift and hope, not to mention the anxiety, of the lovelorn.  I can’t resist declaring that this is one Nora who is not in anyone’s doll house–because she has no husband.  Even so, there is no evidence that her best friend, a dissatisfied wife played by Drea de Matteo, is living in Ibsen’s doll house either.  The adeptly directed Broken English is the work of the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.  It’s more deserving than daddy’s films.

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Shark Night 3-D (2011) is meant to resemble grindhouse movies of the ’70s, which is to say it’s disgustingly low and stupid.  Its PG-13 rating, though, is just about right:  it features neither the F word nor bona fide nudity.

It must be that an American Idol culture sooner or later produces a flick like this, which co-stars an utterly hot but badly performing Katharine McPhee, an  Idol alumna.  Superior acting issues from Sara Paxton and Dustin Milligan, who are also utterly hot.  The thing is, if Shark Night were a song routine, Simon Cowell would deservedly savage it.

Make a grindhouse movie if you will, but a useless mess is–probably–all you’ll end up with. 

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Though somewhat plebeian, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) is a heartfelt and unusual religious, or Christian, film.  The direction is sometimes heavy-handed, as when Jesus dissuades the Jewish men from stoning Mary Magdalene.  But mainly it is absolutely solid, and several scenes make the movie memorable.

One of these is when Jesus stamps to death the strange snake which slithers out from under the androgynous Satan’s garment and which presumably represents evil.  Another is the sequence in which at Golgotha the wind starts blowing and the sky becomes overcast to convey a sense of foreboding and yet hope.  It precedes Jesus’ death and the tear-from-the-eye-of-God shot, and all of it is good directorial work from Gibson.

Even better is the resurrection scene.  We see, from the Lord’s perspective, the stone roll away inside the dark tomb and a subsequent shot of thrown-off graveclothes.  Then Gibson presents just the right images of Christ’s face in profile.

True, the violent cruelty of the Romans becomes tiresome, but the film succeeds at showing us utter mayhem along the Via Dolorosa after Simon of Cyrene is grabbed up and Jesus collapses.  Too, thank goodness we get a respite from all the cruelty with an interlude, very Catholic, about Veronica and her handkerchief.  Veronica, by the way, is both Jewish and sweet, but The Passion of the Christ does come down hard on the Jews because, as critic Stanley Kauffmann explained, the New Testament comes down hard on the Jews.  Gibson’s film is a biblical one.  Accordingly, however, it does not shy away from the truth of Jesus Christ having died for all humanity, for Jew and Gentile alike.  That quiet resurrection confirms that “he was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53), those of all of us.

Jim Caviezel is fine as Jesus, though Maia Morgenstern, remarkable in The Oak (1991), has an easy part to play as Mary.  Still her anguish is real.  With his impeccable facial play, Hristo Shopov (Pontius Pilate) is magisterial.

Again, The Passion is a bit Hollywood-plebeian:  I can do without the demon-baby Satan carries in his arms in one scene.  But in its own way the film is riveting, a brutal work of orthodoxy about Evil and Redemption.  It makes the unorthodox The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) look even sicker and stupider than it is.