Films

Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol detained nearly 450,000 illegal aliens along the Mexican border. The year before, 417 migrants were found dead in the desert or Rio Grande, their journeys circumscribed by harsh conditions. How many of these hundreds of thousands are children traveling solo? Which Way Home tells the story of the children who leave their families in hopes of a better life. Some will make it, some will not. Andres Zea reviews.

China's Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, on the mighty Yangtze River promises to increase the river's shipping capacity and to deliver electricity to millions of citizens. But at what cost? Millions of people have been displaced and entire cities subsumed, forever changing the livelihoods of untold families. John Schellhase reviews Up the Yangtze, an intimate chronicling of the dam's impact on two young people.

Spain's official entry in the foreign film category for the Oscars, Even the Rain, is based on the bloody beginning of the late Howard Zinn's famous A People's History of the United States, where the explorer Christopher Columbus is revealed to be more brute than hero. Director Icíar Bollaín weaves the Bolivian Water Wars into the narrative, thereby blurring the violence of past and present. Find out more in this video interview by Jika González.

After Mohammad Rasoulof made The White Meadows, he and fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi were sentenced to six years in prison. The Iranian government also banned the pair from filmmaking for 20 years. What could make the ruling regime so angry? Eric Anthamatten reviews this revolutionary moral allegory and masterpiece of global cinema.

In 2007, filmmaker Michael Moore released Sicko, a documentary that mocked and excoriated a failing H.M.O. health care system in the United States. Three years later, President Obama signed into law legislation that seeks to right some of the wrongs underscored in Moore's film. With health care for every American now in the pipeline, does the country still need this iconoclast? Corinne Goldenberg takes a second look at the controversial film.

What can the Great Depression teach us about today's Great Recession? In her first installment in a multi-part series on the films of these two economic downturns, Padmini Narumanchi looks for some answers in Charlie Chaplin's classic Modern Times.

In spring 2005, the World Policy Journal was the first magazine to publish the photographs of former Marine Captain Brian Steidle. His undaunted efforts to bring global attention to the unfolding genocide in Darfur, Sudan, were then captured in The Devil Came on Horseback. Corrie Hulse reviews the moving documentary that pleads for the international community to take action in order to save the lives of those facing mass atrocities in war-torn Sudan. 

While the film is ostensibly about how humans and non-humans coexist—peacefully or otherwise—in South Africa, District 9 is much more than a sci-fi depiction of inter-species relations. Claiming unfair stereotyping of and bias against its citizenry, the Nigerian government, for one, went so far as to ban the showing of Neill Blomkamp's new movie. But metaphors in the film that happen to speak to present-day African race relations and geopolitics probe even deeper. Looking at Blomkamp's and Sony Pictures' complex use of metaphor in the film and its viral marketing campaign to engage present and past race relations in South Africa and elsewhere, JK Fowler wonders, what message are they trying to send?

Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary of events surrounding the 1982 Lebanon War, but it is more than just an historical record, and more than a simple cartoon. Meg Beach-Hacking says writer-director Ari Folman's aesthetic vision and exploration of the role of memory in recalling traumatic events is both heart-rendering and transcendent.

Danny Boyle's surprise blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire did more than win eight Oscars earlier this year. Corinne Goldenberg takes a look at what the film means to slum life in India, Western portrayals of the developing world, and the cultural juggernaut that is Bollywood.