It’d be hard for anyone to poke holes in Sicario, a dark, pulpy thriller crafted exceptionally well by director Denis Villeneuve and his team. The story starts as a slow-burn mystery, following Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), a wary FBI agent slung head-first into a shady government task force mission meant to cleanse the U.S./Mexico border of drugs, corruption, and violence. As the streets fill with blood we slowly uncover, with Kate, more and more of the truth behind her new team’s blatantly unethical methods of crime-fighting, the film develops into a tense, action-packed scramble that will leave you gasping for breath.

Sicario is so confidently presented that many of its finer details may go under-appreciated. One subtlety that comes to mind is the sense of traversal Villeneuve creates to immerse us in the story’s nightmarish setting. Early in the film, we see Kate traveling with her team in a caravan of armed vehicles, rolling through the streets of Juarez en route to apprehending a suspect that may lead them to the head of the cartel. We see bodies hanging under an overpass like aging meat, their bodies mutilated, blood dried. Aerial shots of Mexico fill the screen with orange, dusty earth, emphasizing the fact that the Americans are invaders in a sprawling, buzzing hornet’s nest. Cinematographer Roger Deakins is invaluable, shooting Mexico as a forbidden place polluted by death and despair.

The care Villeneuve puts into making these sequences, in which we take time to watch the team travel from point A to point B, is the core of what makes Sicario so engrossing. The tension builds with each gruesome thing we see, each morally indefensible act Kate is forced to participate in. The storytelling evokes a sinking feeling of “I’m not supposed to be here” that makes every little moment terrifying in its own, twisted way. It’s one of those great movies that forces you to go at its pace rather than pandering to yours. It can be unbearably intense at times, which in turn makes it an unforgettable, white-knuckle experience.

Blunt is supported by two of the industry’s best, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. Brolin plays a Department of Defense consultant named Matt who acts as the veritable keeper of secrets on the task force’s. He’s a laid-back, Dude-like agent who only gets serious when he’s on the front lines or when Kate is badgering him for the truth. The enigmatic shadow hanging over the movie is Del Toro’s Alejandro, a skilled killer and torturer whose presence on the team worries Kate maybe more than anything. Why is he here, and who does he actually work for?

This is one of the best performances of Del Toro’s career. As Alejandro, he intimidates his prey not just by hurting them (though he does loads of that), but by invading their space. In the cramped back seat of a car, he extracts information from a corrupt cop not by punching him, but by driving his finger into his hostage’s ear canal. When the hostage refuses to talk, he leans his body weight on him, driving his shoulder up under his chin as if to say in a twisted gesture of dominance. When we learn the truth behind Alejandro’s motivations, the character and performance become even richer.

The second half of the film would be standard action fare if stood on its own, but when stood on the foundation of paranoia and confusion built in the first half, it’s volcanic, heart-stopping entertainment. The story’s revelations don’t come easy or quickly, but when they do, they’re rattling and resonant and will stick with you for days.

Matthew Heineman’s documentary Cartel Land was a shock to the system, taking us deep into the belly of the border drug war, and Sicario serves as a perfect narrative companion, exploring the seedy underworld through a more poetic, explicitly violent lens. Does the Sicario demonize Mexico? No. It considers the psychology of the people who drive the conflict that ravages those terrorized towns on the border and questions the nature of U.S. involvement. Villeneuve, his cast, and crew have made an undeniable, powerful film that works on so many levels it’s scary.

Taking us into the eye of a storm of vigilante warfare, Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land is a thrilling, layered documentary steeped in danger and serpentine street politics. Warring factions in the Mexican state of Michuacán have taken the lives of innocents and filled the streets with unlicensed armaments in their crossfire: drug cartels like the Knights Templar have terrorized the people for years, while the white T-shirt-wearing Autodefensas, led by Dr. Jose Mireles, have fought to protect the civilians, though their methods are as illegal as their drug-trafficking opposition.

Heineman and his small crew dive straight into the street wars of Mexico as well as take a look at the life of Tim Foley, an American leading a group called Arizona Border Recon, who’ve devoted their lives to protecting U.S. borders from the drugs and bloodshed ravaging Mexico. It’s an intimate portrait that explores the politics motivations of all parties, even those in the cartel. The film is packed with jaw-dropping revelations that reveal the true nature of the conflict raging just beyond our borders.

I spoke to Matthew about his experience making Cartel Land, which is out in limited release now.

Have audiences’ reaction to the film been what you anticipated, or were you surprised?
I generally don’t try to spend too much time anticipating exactly how an audience is going to react. I tried to make a film that moved me. Hopefully people latch onto it. I’m really grateful for the response we’ve gotten.

The movie really makes your mind move a mile a minute. Lots of stuff to ponder, lots of questions to consider.
One of the things I wanted to do was let the story tell itself, especially on the Mexican side. I originally thought I was telling this very simple hero/villain story. Guys in white shirts fighting against guys in black shirts. Slowly, over time, I realized the line between good and evil is much more blurry. The story evolved in a way I never could have imagined or predicted. I’m not a war reporter. I’ve never been in situations like this before. I could never have imagined I’d be in shootouts between vigilantes and the cartel.

Is the way the story plays out in the film the way you experienced it?
Yeah, totally. That was one of my goals in editing the film, to allow the audience to go on the same journey I went on. All those moments when I felt the rug was pulled out from under me; all those moments when I thought I understood what was happening, but things changed. I wanted the audience to go through those same emotions, go on that same roller coaster.

How long did it take to shoot?
About a year. We first started filming in Arizona, and after about four or five months, my father actually sent me an article about the Autodefensas, having no idea I’d actually follow through on it. Right when I read it, I knew I wanted to create this parallel narrative about vigilanteism on both sides of the border. Two weeks later, I was filming in Mexico. I spent about nine months in Mexico, on and off. About one or two weeks in Mexico every month.

The subjects in your film are larger than life. Do you think living a life under threat of death breeds richer personalities?
I don’t know. I didn’t want to make a simplistic film. I didn’t want to make a film with an agenda. I really wanted to let the story dictate where I would go. I didn’t want to put nice, neat boxes around the characters or the movements. I wanted to be comfortable in exploring these murky, murky waters we were filming in. There were many times, especially near the end of the film, when I’d be on a mission in the back of a truck, I truly didn’t know if they were the good guys or the bad guys. That was a scary, scary thing.

Did that mess with your head?
Yeah. It was unlike anything I’d ever done before. It definitely had a personal impact on me. It solidified in my mind how I view life and how I want to live my life. Have an open mind. I’ve been criticized for not having a stronger point of view. But in my opinion, the film does have a very strong point of view. Just because I don’t have talking heads or experts or stats putting things into context for people doesn’t mean the film doesn’t have a powerful voice. Making the film reinforced my desire to look at things with an open mind. A mentor of mine in the film world said, “If you end up with the story you started with, you weren’t listening along the way.” I listened every day as I went through this complicated moral quagmire of a journey.

Unlike a lot of other docs that might cover this material, I think your movie conveys what the situation in Mexico and on the border feels like rather than what it looks like on paper.
My goal was to take this issue out of the headlines. It’s glorified by TV shows and in headlines, and I wanted to get beyond that and put my camera right in the middle of the action. Put myself right in the middle of the action. That’s what I tried to do, not from the outside, but from the middle of it.

What was the vision for the aesthetics of the film?
Aesthetics were really important to me. I wanted to mask the intensity of what we were seeing with the way we shot it. It was very important.

I’ve been enjoying this influx of documentaries that are very cinematic and utilize visual storytelling as opposed to talking heads. It’s a great time for docs.
Yeah, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be making documentary films. The technology has been democratized by cheaper cameras and cheaper ways of making film. The outlets have expanded: there are more and more places to show your film. That’s really, really exciting. I think documentary films generate powerful conversations and show people a world they’ve never seen before. I feel incredibly grateful and honored that I can do this for a living and tell stories.

You put yourself in a lot of danger for this movie. What drives you as a filmmaker?
What an amazing thing to be able to spend time with people and have them open up their lives to me. To travel around the world and tell people stories. It’s a privilege, it’s an honor and something I take very seriously. I fell in love with Mexico and the people of Michoacán, and I felt a great duty and obligation to tell this complicated story. I’m really glad with how it turned out.

A consistently intriguing figure in the independent film community, John Sayles is a sometimes brilliant, usually “meh”, filmmaker whose recent work leans more toward the “meh” side of the fence. With that being said, there’s no one quite like him–films like 1996’s probing political character study, Lone Star, approach greatness, but stand in stark contrast to his writing work on iffy genre films like Pihranna and The Howling. Go For Sisters, Sayles’ rock-solid (if clichéd) tale of a woman in search of her son in a seedy Mexican underworld rife with drug deals, corrupt federales, human smuggling, and gun violence, gives his legacy a bit of a boost. Sayles’ spontaneous dialog and game actors are the real heroes here, saving the schematic narrative from dipping into mediocrity.

LisaGay Hamilton plays Bernice Stokes, a principled parole officer in Southern California who employs an old friend named Fontayne (Yolonda Ross) to help her track down her son, Randy, who’s gone missing in Mexico, tangled up with the worst kind of criminals. Fontayne, a recovering drug addict working hard to stick to the straight and narrow, is at first reluctant to follow Bernice into the world of crime she must enter to find her son, but when she realizes her once close friend (people always said they could “go for sisters”) just isn’t built tough enough for the task at hand, she obliges. Hamilton and Ross’ chemistry is remarkable throughout the film, though the relationship produces most of its best moments in the first half hour, in which the duo’s interplay is the prime focus.

In this first section, Sayles’ dialog is crackling and naturalistic, and he pokes and prods racial and economic issues like he does when he’s in top form. Then, the film devolves into a paint-by-numbers detective story that feels like a lifeless, hackneyed riff on Taken. It’s at this point that Edward James Olmos, playing an ex-cop named Suarez, joins the ladies as they travel South across the border. The stench of bad, CBS cop show begins to stink up the joint, and we see cliché after cliché begin to pile up (shady character interrogations, stealthily placing trackers on the bottoms of cars, late-night alleyway shootouts…all that stuff).

But, even amidst the trite proceedings of this painfully lengthy section of the film, the cast (including Olmos) continue to make Sayles’ dialog sing, making even the most banal scenarios at least sound interesting. At one point, the ladies interrogate a girl who’s apparently Randy’s lady friend outside a club late at night. Bernice asks the distraught girl (she’s just learned of his disappearance) earnestly, “Randy make you any promises?”, to which she replies, tearfully, “You have a good son. He’s a very good son.” The moment is so understated and sublime that it makes you forget how stale the setup is.

The way Sayles films the shadowy Mexican streets Bernice and Fontayne weave through on their intrepid rescue mission is interesting at times (he doesn’t shy away from thick, shadowy darkness), but it never evokes enough tension or emotion to elevate any given moment. Though the missing-person tale he weaves is about as uninteresting as it gets for this type of movie, Sayles and his actors hit the sweet spot when it comes to creating deep, compelling characters. It’s Hamilton and Ross’ incredible on-screen partnership that makes Go For Sisters a solid success for the indie maverick.