ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

blanche-2 It was sad to me when people on this site asked if Gandhi was a fictional character, when they thought Judi Dench in "Ladies in Lavender" came off as a "dirty old lady," when they thought Kenny O'Donnell in "Thirteen Days" was a fictional character to give Kevin Costner a part when the film used White House transcripts (I guess they just stuck Kenny's dialogue into transcripts?) - it was sad. But to laugh and give a negative review to a movie that tells an important story, whether or not it stars Jennifer Lopez, is awful and shows that there are people who are regulars on this board who are not just stupid. They're complete morons.This is based on a true story about murders of young women that have been taking place in Juarez, Mexico for years, with a large number of women have been raped and murdered or simply disappeared. The women work in the maquiladoras, 24/7 companies that employ cheap labor, usually women, and create disposable products. Apparently the women are disposable too. The women are normally attacked as they are going home.Jennifer Lopez plays a reporter who is assigned this story against her will but becomes involved in it, protecting a young woman who dug herself out of her own grave, and going undercover in a maquiladora herself to uncover one of the murderers.This horrible situation is not dealt with efficiently by the government or the police. In part, this is due to political pressure and the fact that mob and drug money is often involved in the ownership of the factories.The North American Free Trade agreement, NAFTA, was expanded in 1994 and provided new opportunities for the maquiladoras. This was an issue director Gregory Nava wanted to explore, and Jennifer Lopez, Martin Sheen, and Antonio Banderas signed on. Because of the R rating and the opinion of several focus groups, it was not released in theaters. It's not a great movie. As a TV movie, it would have been much better. It also doesn't look very expensive. I don't happen to think Jennifer Lopez is a horrible actress. Unlike some here, I thought her back story, shown in flashback, was very clear.This is an important story, made by sincere people. One can at least appreciate that they wanted to raise awareness of this issue. It's easy to sit and criticize a film; it's another to go out and make one. And maybe a few people will think about a rich country like Mexico - rich in minerals, tourism, manufacturing -- that pays people $3 to $5 a day and has a population that lives in poverty while the people that control the money send it out of the country. Is it any wonder they try to sneak into the U.S.? Anything is better than how they are forced to live. And nothing is done to help them. Nothing.

sb-901-395404 This is a terrific movie. However, I can see why some people might not like it due to the somewhat average production in places.Form: I thought the colour filters were a bit overdone but still quite nice, acting was acceptable but not the best given the cast, dialogue was clunky at times and sometimes quite unrealistic. I found much of the violence/exhumation extremely unsettling and the shanty towns and factory scenes leaving me a terrible sense of oppression and hopelessness, as they should.Content: While the plot was a little crazy and predictable at times (e.g. the baiting scenario) the underlying message is what really makes this movie worth watching. It's pretty well on the money for describing the institutional injustice of the corrupt US and Mexican government-corporate capitalists . As Chomsky succinctly puts it, the Free Trade Agreement is neither free nor trade nor an agreement.The movie also shows how most people in a position to do something about injustice choose the easier and often selfish option to ignore it, in favour of personal reward, or due to fear of financial loss and receiving a similar fate to the oppressed. While the resolution of the main plot was a bit awkward, it was wonderful not to see everything neatly resolved with everyone coming out a winner (obviously this is not a Hollywood film) – two of the three main characters did not triumph individually but received the true reward so often received for standing against injustice – personal sacrifice.Personally, I found the movie very challenging, leaving me with both a sense of guilt and desire to do something really worthwhile to affect change. I'm mystified as to why this movie has only now just reached my local video store (Australia)...Final score: Form (5) + Content (10) / 2 = 7.5

James Horak There can be a special elegance to a movie that touches the human condition honestly and with clarity. Add to that the harshest of unrealized economic realities and you have Bordertown, a film just as significant to our future as to our past. For it shows us in the least compromising terms, what the trends of today are creating for the reality of tomorrow. It is a movie this reviewer had thought would never be made. Not since Apocalypse Now, has Martin Sheen delivered his role so magnificently. As the newspaper editor, George Morgan, his delivery of lines in a particular scene (summing up these aforementioned trends,) is comparable with that elegant rendering of Sir Richard Burton when that late great stands before the bar to indict a system showing neither fairness or justice to his client in the Medusa Touch.Jennifer Lopez as Lauren Adrian, an investigative reporter sent into a story neither her editor or her can imagine in scope, IS the part. Revealing just how capable she is with character delineation, Lopez excels beyond all expectation. Had this performance been on the stage, five minutes of "bravo" would have ensued at curtain. Writer/director Gregory Nava is to be applauded on every score, not the least of which is his courage.This reviewer does not say this easily nor lightly: If adequately promoted for what it was worth and for the import of its message, this movie might have changed the course of history if made a decade earlier. It still might make its mark in helping to remedy the economic and political madness now placed on the world's table. Highly, highly, highly recommended. JCH

elshikh4 This is a rare kind of movie. The real political thriller (where "thriller" doesn't preponderate "political") is not that available. I only remember movies like Costa-Gavras' Z, Oliver Stone's JFK, and a few more. (Bordertown), despite some minor weak points, comes simply without much noisiness to join the list of their elite.The script is the first hero here. It's loosely based on a series of unsolved murders in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, an industrial border town near El Paso, Texas. Where innumerable young women have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered since 1993. It is a master choice when you find a story as rich as this especially when it got : a crime where the thrilling try to know the killer, chase him, then escape from his plots + a shadow, for this same hunt, for a bigger culprits including nations, firms and certain agreements + the realistic factor where the story is based on true events and live happenings still, unfortunately, happen ! Actually it could be the perfect movie for me. And it is that intensive to the extent where one watching is surely not enough.Look at the main character and its journey, she's firstly not that ideal fighter, she accepted the mission for just a professional promotion, but she goes through what makes it a self's case when she meets her tortured inner teenager in the surviving victim and seeks the revenge for them both out of the same circumstances or culprit. Let alone the hidden connection between that poor isolated factory on the border and the giant American electronics' business. Or the suppression that these companies compel so certain issues can't go public (it would push you to ask yourself why Britney Spears is on the head of news for nearly everyday while more important, urgent and effective stories didn't even see the light !!). "In every country there are laws for the rich people and others for the poor" how many times you hear a line like that in American movie?! And last but not the least, the clever basic symbol about the main 2 criminals, the bus's driver and the rich statesman; namely the ordinary internal putridity, and the authority's corruption that could sell the dignity or the safety of a nation to its enemies; it's where the rapist killer is – literally and metaphorically – the politician.There are many powerful points : the matter of Lopez's dyed hair as a way to disguise herself away from her truth, or to escape from her painful past or rather roots. Or the moment of Lopez getting out of the dirty factory with all the female workers after facing the rotten businessman; the way it was shot made her as if she's the conscience of this wronged nation. I must refer to the sequence when Lopez dressed like a factory girl; once because the driver takes her to another location this time while the police is waiting in totally different one (smart thrill), and once more because the movie makers didn't waste the chance to make the heroine discover accidentally a collective cemetery (another lethal putrefaction like there are more free killers, or that this community is stricken with a genocide of corruption!).The cinematography is another hero, being artistically realistic. Just observe the presence of the dark colors, especially the black, all the time. It's like a hurt hurting chromatic scream against injustice or the fat cartels as the real new devil. The cast did it right, but it was Lopez who got me utterly. She owned the screen, being sensitive, struggler, wounded, and believe it or not so sexy as well. The pace is genius to deliver all the action and sorrow in one movie. And originally the direction handled the job finely. It's that capably dark to an extent gives you suffocation's feeling during the watching. Rare time to witness that power in a movie was written and directed by the same person.However, nothing is fully perfect. There are some points that bothered me very. First of all, the explicit fabrication of the end's scenes when all the conflict's parties gathered illogically in one place while one fire to achieve the poetic justice at its best ! Add to that : the absence of the reason why Lopez's parents got killed ? The way Lopez was shooting all the buses' drivers with an obvious camera while nobody objected ? The strangeness of the attempt to kill Lopez and Banderas (looks like something had been added after the movie was done!). And finally the lost fact about the relationship that could gather a bus driver and a rich statesman !No doubt that the appearance of some Latino stars in this movie makes it a manifesto more than the Hollywood thriller. Speaking of which, while the movie is produced by Möbius Entertainment ?? Having none of the major studios' emblems at the start ?!, you've got to ask why Hollywood doesn't involve in this kind of movies very ? Maybe because Hollywood, the basically entertaining Hollywood, is a part of the fat cooperated America that this movie encounters. For example, in the same year of (2006) Hollywood gave us many movies with female leads and hot conflicts but such as (Silent Hill), (The Grudge 2), (UltraViolet), (Underworld: Evolution).. I think my point is so clear! Sometimes it's hard to believe but America, the home of freedom, does have problems with freedom, selecting or forcing sometimes not to explore the innermost.