Stinking Badges

Clancy Sigal CounterPunch
There are thousands of Mexican workers in Los Angeles. Their home country is two-and-a-half hours down the I-5 South of San Diego to Tijuana, Baja California and deep into Cartelia. But as far as most of my mainstream news outlets are concerned Mexico might be located in Tibet or at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. I know more about Mosul in Iraq or Kiev in the Ukraine than I do about anything south of my border. I do know that Mexico is North America's ISIS...

Bearman - Review of Oscar Contender "Revenant"

Christopher Benfey The New York Review of Books
Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.