Directed by Jack Zagha Kababie and Yossy Zagha, The Containment centers on Romero as Sister Esperanza, a nun whose attempt to help a family during a violent exorcism unleashes a far darker and more dangerous force than anticipated. Romero’s performance blends restraint, intensity, and vulnerability, elevating the film beyond traditional genre tropes and positioning her as the emotional lens through which the horror unfolds.

The film follows a grieving mother and her troubled teenage daughter after the death of the family patriarch, setting off a chain of events that draws the Church into a confrontation with an entity that refuses to be controlled. As the narrative escalates, Romero’s character becomes both a witness and a catalyst, navigating faith, fear, and moral consequence as the situation spirals.

Romero a seasoned actress whose work include The Eye, Drag Me to Hell, and The Burning Plain has worked in both US and Latin markets, featured in over 20 films and television shows, and is also a musician in the band The White Cherries.

Produced and distributed by Level 33 Entertainment, The Containment continues Romero’s momentum in genre storytelling, showcasing her ability to lead character-driven films within commercial theatrical spaces. The project reinforces her growing presence as a Latina actress carrying complex, commanding roles in U.S. cinema.

The Containment is currently screening at AMC locations across the United States.

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Crossing the concrete landscape of Los Angeles on public transport with precious cargo, Raquel (Sofia Yepes), a queer Latina aspiring to become a major music producer, is also carrying plenty of personal baggage wherever she goes. Her main occupation is working for a drug dealer, which comes with dangerous liabilities. Add to that her turbulent, unresolved past in the military, and the result is a ticking time bomb of pent-up rage. 

When Raquel runs into Veronica (Sidney Flanigan), a frazzled, but charming young woman who also claims to have creative dreams, she sees an opportunity for a fresh start. Best known for her lead role in the acclaimed indie Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Flanigan plays the part with believable fragility, while slowly revealing a more complex personality underneath the defenseless façade. Their serendipitous encounter is the foundation of the sleekly shot moody crime thriller The Low End Theory from writer-director Francisco Ordonez. Their instant connection spells trouble for Raquel, who willingly takes major risks both on the romantic and professional front in order to pursue this incandescent fling. 

From their first time the two women meet inside Raquel’s car, cinematographer Gemma Doll-Grossman’s camera becomes attached to their faces. The dance of intensely tight closeups playing with colorful lighting is how we come to understand the fiery spontaneity of what Veronica and Raquel feel for each other—whether at the club or during a moment of sexual intimacy. The camera can’t get any closer, and that’s an effective choice on Ordonez and Doll-Grossman’s part to communicate the raging emotions at play. 

But Raquel has a partner, Giselle (Ser Anzoategui), who happens to be the sister of her boss Uly (Eddie Martinez), a drug lord with a conscience. Then there’s the menacing presence of Efraim (Rene Rosado), her co-worker and the person with whom she creates music. All of these relationships, as well as Uly’s ill-obtained cash become entangled in a series of lies and terrible consequences that Raquel sets in motion in order to protect Veronica, who owes money to other nefarious parties that threaten to hurt if she doesn’t pay it back. 

For as much as The Low End Theory surrenders to well traveled paths when it comes to urban stories with a protagonist involved in illicit activities, the central relationship between Raquel and Veronica rings refreshing even when the screenplay leans into expected tropes. 

Yet, it’s Yepes’ convincingly layered performance as someone guided by a belief in a higher power, namely karmic forces, that keeps one invested in the narrative. Yepes remarkably conveys a cocktail of conflicted sentiments, particularly because of the clash between the positive light in which others see Raquel, and the dark, violent thoughts that plague her mind. There admittedly too many facets of Raquel’s world on display for any of them to truly take precedence. Thankfully Yepes remains consistently compelling through it all. 

Though far from entirely unique, The Low End Theory packs enough visual panache and the kinetic flourishes of Ordonez’s direction to result in an engaging neo-noir effort with characters who rarely get to be at the center of a story like this and where even the supporting parts benefit from above-average acting.

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In movies like Avatar and Guardians of the Universe, just to name a few, Zoe Saldana has solidified her creds as a lethal action / adventure hero superstar who happens to be Latina. And now on the heels of her powerful dramatic performance in Emilia Perez (and the girl can dance and sing, too), which has garnered her many award nominations, Saldana puts both acting / action talents in violent, harmonic, full blown display on Lioness.

Saldana plays Joe, the head of a top-secret special op unit called “Lioness.” Their top-secret CIA mission is to insert a female asset (a lioness) into terrorists’ cells and make high value targets in the cell vulnerable and exposed, at which point, Saldana’s team “terminate” the target with “extreme prejudice.”

Saldana and her team are salty, earthy, hardened, experienced warriors and they all drop more “F” bombs in one episode than all the bombs dropped  on Germany, Japan and Vietnam combined. The shootouts are nail-biting bullet blazing scenes with Saldana relishing all the action, almost to a fault.

Her life is complicated by a marriage and family she is neglecting to fulfil these dangerous missions.  Saldana finds herself torn between duty and family. She’s a flawed, adrenaline- driven, emotionally conflicted person. Saldana plays it beautifully in a compelling, riveting performance.

“Lioness” is the name of the special ops program and the female asset to be inserted in a terrorist cell. But it also perfectly describes the fierce persona of Zoe Saldana in this pulse-pounding, Latina character-driven, action, thriller hit Paramount+ Original TV series.

Lioness streams on Paramount+, Hulu and other streaming platforms.

Stars:  Zoe Saldana, Laysla De Oliveira, Dave Annable, Jill Wagn

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Cueva, who is also the producer of Angel Baby, takes us on a rollercoaster of emotions as she navigates her way through grief and terror. Meanwhile, Val meets a mysterious neighbor (Chris Browning) desperately searching for the truth, and with the help of Maggie, the local bar owner (Rebecca DeMornay), she gains the strength to face what is tormenting her peace, leaving the audience cheering for her in the final act. 

Angel Baby is a film that, though delivering plenty of jump scares and terrifying musical cues, balances cinema horror with the deeper themes of grief and ultimately, acceptance.

Angel Baby is produced by Cueva of Cave Entertainment, and financed by Fearful Pictures. Cueva founded Cave Entertainment to make ground-breaking female-driven films and television shows focused on Latino, indigenous, and underrepresented voices. With the USC Annenberg

Inclusion Initiative report, released in October 2023, revealing that across 16 years, 3.1% of “Produced by” credits went to a Latino or Hispanic individual with “Women” representing less than 1% overall. Less than one-quarter of one percent (<0.25%) of all speaking roles went to Native American characters across the 16 years studied. In fact, the percentage of Native American roles did not exceed 1% across any of the years evaluated. There was only 1 film with a Native actor in the leading role.

Angel Baby is coming to select Theaters in the US and On Demand Dec 15. The film is distributed by Quiver Distribution in North America and Canada. The screenplay is written by Elisa Manzini (I’ll Be Waiting) and Rebecca Stahl (Everything in Between). Whitney Anderson (Holland, Michigan) and Chris Browning (Bright) also star in the film. Cinematographer is Alvaro Martin Blanco, Production Designer is David Hartwell, Composer is Max Di Carlo, Costume Designer is Elaine Lin.

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While  Shyamalan is keeping the plot under wraps, the trailer offers up some hints. A group of people visiting a seemingly idyllic beach cove. But the place may have a sinister secret: everyone experiences an apparent acceleration of their growing and aging process in a matter of hours. And the enclosed cove doesn’t seem to offer a way out.

M. Night Shyamalan co-wrote the screenplay based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Levy and Frederick Peeters, the authors of the publication.

Other cast members include a constellation of talents: Rufus Sewell (Dark City), Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace) Embeth Davidtz (Bicentennial Man), Eliza Scanlen (Little Women), Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Alex Wolff (Hereditary), Ken Leung (The Sopranos), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending), Emun Elliott (Prometheus), Kathleen Chalfant (Duplicity), Matthew Shear (Mistress America), Alexa Swinton (Emergence), Aaron Pierre (Krypton), Nolan River (Adverse), and Daniel Ison (Servant).

Featured Photo: Trailer Screenshot

–Latin Heat News Service

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ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Christopher Nolan has earned a reputation as one of the best filmmakers in the modern cinematic era. “The Dark Knight,” “Inception” and “Dunkirk” have earned accolades for heart-stopping cinematography, sound editing and philosophical concepts.

But Nolan has a reputation of being so philosophical that much of what he portrays on-screen goes over his audience’s head. With a tendency to lose viewers in his stories, movies like Tenet become a crapshoot with audiences—and an even bigger risk for studios such as Warner Bros.
The coronavirus pandemic did a number on Nolan’s eleventh motion picture. Warner Bros had high hopes for the blockbuster and invested $250 million and a $300 million hype-train marketing budget. In a world where movie theater access is subject to government-ordered shutdowns, turning a profit on this movie was wishful thinking. And the release of Tenet was delayed three times in 2020, pushing its release from March to July and then to September.

The Story: An unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) is in the middle of a dangerous SWAT operation at the Kiev Opera House in Ukraine. The man known simply as “the protagonist” rescues an exposed spy and captures a strange artifact, but the mission turned out to be just a test: His true mission is to prevent the sale of a strange new weapon that inverts bullets into its victims by moving backward through time. The agent must investigate the group behind the weapon, called Tenet, to figure out who they are and how they have access to the weapon. The deeper the agent gets into his mission, the stranger things become. Eventually he begins to question his own reality.
Bright Spots: Tenet delivers some of Nolan’s best technical work. The action is well choreographed, tight and gripping. One impressive stunt involved crashing a real Boeing 747 jetliner into an airport terminal—which could explain the film’s massive budget. Ludwig Göransson’s film score offers a great substitute to Hans Zimmer. The music includes painstaking details like playing notes in reverse, a fine touch for a time-travel epic.
The actors outshine the writing in “Tenet.” John David Washington and Robert Patterson give stunning performances that stand out in ways their characters don’t. Washington is slowly proving his worth as a leading man with a swagger that commands on-screen attention; Patterson’s charismatic work proves that his former “Twilight” days are far behind him.

A lack of emotional power limits this film’s storytelling potential. The main character is never named, robbing audiences of a chance to identify with him emotionally. Nolan has given audiences some memorable characters to connect with before, even in movies where their lives unfold in universes that bend viewers’ minds. Washington is too mysterious for his own good and the only genuine interaction he has with the world is an odd pseudo-relationship with Elizabeth Debicki that never crosses the threshold of believability.
The Takeaway: Audiences will split on how they interpret Tenet ,and on whether it will have a lasting impact. Is this the film that saves cinema in the year of Covid-19? Probably not. Tenet is too “out there” psychologically for audiences who crave a stress-busting popcorn film. But bold ideas, solid performances and unusual technical achievements still make it a must-see film in a thin year for quality motion pictures.
See or Skip: “Tenet” will excite cinephiles, but it’s too complex for popcorn viewers to ingest in one sitting—or even two.

(Edited by Ganesh Swaminath Lakshman and David Martosko)

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Film Review By Roberto Leal

The Infiltrators is not a Hollywood blockbuster about an elite team of undercover cops who infiltrate drug cartels, the Klan or socialist PTA meetings in San Francisco. As the old saying goes: Truth is stranger than fiction. The Infiltrators filmmakers, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, have crafted a little gem of a story that features heroes equal to any in the Marvel Comic Book Universe.

In 1973, the world hailed the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s book detailed the horrors of the Soviet Union’s vast prison system that locked up political dissidents, like Solzhenitsyn, homosexuals and other social misfits. A self-righteous America pointed an accusatory finger at the Soviet Union and bragged: “Thank God, we’re not like that!”

Fast forward to present day America along our southern border and witness the explosive growth of for-profit (because we’re capitalist, not communists) detention centers where up to 40,000 undocumented immigrants languish, often for years, in what can rightly be called The Latino Gulag Archipelago.

The Infiltrators tells the true, inspiring story of young, undocumented Dreamers, who intentionally let themselves be taken by the Border Patrol, to a detention center in Broward County, Florida, where undocumented immigrants await deportation. The Dreamers, as members of the National Immigration Youth Alliance (NIYA), use protests, online petitions, and pressure on local politicians, to stop the deportations of the detainees, who are being held for minor offenses.

We follow Marco (Maynor Alvarado) as he covertly works in the detention center to stop deportations and secure releases. The mild-mannered, but resolute Marco must maneuver carefully to avoid his cover being blown and winding up in solitary confinement and obscurity.

When Marco finds out there are 100 women being held in the detention center, the NIYA team on the outside decide to send Viridiana (Chelsea Rendon) inside to coordinate the Dreamer’s mission with Marco. Complications arise when Marco and Viridiana are found out by the Border Patrol. Afterall, The Infiltrators is a thriller. What would a thriller be without obstacles, danger and complications?

But the Infiltrators, which won the Next Section Audience Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, has won critical acclaim for its brilliant cross genre approach in creating a powerful documentary/thriller. It’s an effective story-telling technique. Oliver Stone did it successfully in JFK (1991). Rob Reiner’s rockumentary, Spinal Tap, (1994), used it to great comic effect. But the makers of The Infiltrators, have taken the documentary/narrative film structure, and to quote Emeril Lagasse, “kicked it up a notch.”

The real-life documentary footage of the Dreamers protesting outside the detention center and the re-enactments of the actual events inside, have been masterfully and seamlessly edited together into one cohesive whole. At no point in The Infiltrators can you tell where the documentary ends, and the re-enactment begins. This is a tribute to the first-rate editing and cinematography.

In any good thriller, pacing is an important factor. However, the suspense and tension cannot be too constant or hyperbolic, or the effect is lost. But the amount of suspense and tension must be just enough, and the plot points strategically placed to keep the audience in their seats for the narrative ride.  

Directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra surely must be acolytes of The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.  Like Hitchcock, Rivera and Ibarra deftly combine the musical score, understated acting, along with excellent pacing, to allow the suspense to play out in an even-handed and measured way 

I was glad to see that screenwriters Alex Rivera and Aldo Velasco avoided the temptation to paint the Border Patrol and Guards as cartoonish, evil villains. Of course, the Border Patrol and detention center Guards are uniformly big, imposing characters who can quickly turn tough and menacing when the situation calls for it.

Conversely, the Dreamers are not portrayed as annoyingly noble, altruistic, goody-two-shoes. Maynor Alvarado’s performance, as Marco, is especially noteworthy. Marco is a bookish type who is more suited to infiltrating a public library, not a hostile immigrant detention center. Marco is quiet and unassuming, but he’s absolutely committed to the mission of the Dreamers and the NIYA.

Alvarado, a veteran of TV shows like, Gray’s Anatomy, NCIS: Los Angeles and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, can do a lot just with his eyes. When Marco shows up at the door of the detention center to intentionally get himself taken in by the Border Patrol, his face clearly reveals his anxiety and inner conflict. Maynor Alvarado’s Marco is the kind of hero you find yourself enthusiastically rooting for.

Chelsea Rendon (Viridiana) made her feature film debut at the tender age of 7, in No Turning Back, a role which garnered her several awards.  She is currently a series regular on VIDA hit drama on the Starz Network. Rendon has perfected her craft in a wide range of TV and film roles. What I liked best about Rendon’s performance of Viridiana is the sheer lack of artifice. She’s obviously a natural born actress.  You are never aware that Rendon is acting. She is Viridiana.

The supporting cast adds depth, texture and authenticity to The Infiltrators. My only criticism of The Infiltrators is why wasn’t it made into a feature length film or a mini-series on Netflix? Everything eventually winds up on Netflix. As a struggling screenwriter, I’d love to be on the writing staff of The Infiltrators mini-series.  Oh well, I guess that makes me a very old Dreamer.

In the opening scene of The Infiltrators, we hear Marco, in voice-over narration say: “Last year, I was reading Kafka. This year, I’m living it.”

The Infiltrators ends on the night of the 2016 presidential election. Marco’s statement has proven to be painfully prophetic. The hateful, racist policies of the Incredible Hoax, currently occupying the White House, has turned our southern border into a disgraceful chain of concentration camps that would turn Eichmann green with envy.

Now, with the specter of the Trumpvirus infecting the immigrants imprisoned down there, we need heroes, like Marco and Viridiana and the NIYA, to spring into action and do their thing, so I can have material to write the screenplay to The Infiltrators: The Sequel.

The Infiltrators is an Oscilloscope Laboratories release. Due to the Trumpvirus Pandemic that has put the kibosh on folks going to the movies, the theatrical premiere date is still TBD. However, The Infiltrators will be available On Demand on June 2.

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As many people debate the pros and cons of Trump’s border wall, the issues at play are starkly laid out in Tejano, an action thriller set on the U.S.-Mexico border to debut on itunes, Amazon, Vudu, Hulu and other digital platforms on March 26.  The feature film, which is distributed by Outsider Pictures, has won numerous awards including the Audience Award at the 2018 Dallas International Film Festival.  The film will be recognized by the Texas State House of Representatives and will screen at the Texas State Capitol on March 22^nd and will play at the San Diego Latino Film Festival on March 23. 

“I set Tejano in the Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexico-U.S. border where I was born,” says director/producer David Blue Garcia. “The film touches on many of the issues that affect South Texas, including the border wall, the drug trade, cartel violence, immigration laws and health care. Tejano does not set out to take political sides but instead to show how these issues affect the day-to-day lives of its characters and influence their choices. The story is told in a style that has been called a thriller/western hybrid or Tex-Mex Noir. It is definitely meant to be entertaining and full of dark humor.”

 Tejano is the story of Javi (Patrick Mackie), a South Texas farmhand who lives and works with his grandfather, Arturo (Roland Hector Uribe). Javi dreams of leaving the border with his Mexican girlfriend but when his grandfather becomes ill, Javi, desperately turns to a Mexican cartel to make some quick cash. Javi embarks on a harrowing journey in which he first swims across the Rio Grande River, evades the border patrol and then faces the border wall, only to find that the cartel has different plans for him.

A favorite on the festival circuit, Tejano was shot entirely on the border of South Texas and in Nuevo Progreso Mexico has garnered over 10 film awards.  All of the actors are bilingual Texas natives and most are native to South Texas. null

 The festival award-winning Tejano was shot entirely on the border of South Texas and in Nuevo Progreso Mexico.  All of the actors are bilingual Texas natives and most are native to South Texas.

“The story itself slithers with twists and turns and unexpected betrayals…” – Austin Chronicle

Garcia is an Emmy Award-winning director and cinematographer based in Austin, Texas. He has lensed six independent feature films including his directorial debut, Tejano. 

Instagram:  @Tejanomovie

Tejano runs 1 hour and 29 minutes and is both in English and Spanish. Writers are Kyle Bogart (Screenplay) with Story by David Blue Garcia

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