** "What made me think is this - a Time Magazine Article, 'Why We Blow Ourselves Up'..."

Investigative journalist Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon breaks it down. Referencing emotions, the Cuban Missile Crisis, rage, chocolate, water and electricity - and 'The Fires Of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion...'

** "Some people will rob you with a six shooter, and others with a fountain pen..."

Terrence Howard Talks Empire, Hustle & Flow, World War III, his upcoming Shirley Chisolm biopic, Shirley - and going toe to toe with real estate vultures targeting his neighborhood movie theater in the exceedingly unconventional neo-western, 'Showdown At The Grand.'

Along with what's been going down with the actors strike, and Howard mad as hell having portrayed king of the music world Lucious Lyon in Empire - but 'I've never seen a dollar in residuals from it' offscreen.

** "I think it's something that we need to be reminded of - that everyone in every industry needs to be treated with dignity..."

Arts Express Crew Spotlight: Mary Murphy. A conversation with the actress extraordinaire in film, theater, television, animation, video games and voice acting, and what she's up to with the Fireside Mystery Theatre, Old Time Radio, and on our show - and thoughts from the actors picket lines.

With connections to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Virginia Woolf, and the Home Shopping Weapons Network... 

At The Gates Review

While most films based on stage dramas go to substantial lengths to conceal their stagnant origins no matter how dramatically conceived - and tend to fail in that regard, the chilling and muffled horror of 'At The Gates' as an undocumented immigrant housekeeper and her son are detained in the locked cellar of their wealthy family employers, skillfully shatters that claustrophobic notion in reverse. And as a culmination of fears simultaneously playing out in the real world, with these terrified characters caught between the threat of violent ICE immigration capture, and captivity as workers. Or are they?

At The Gates unravels with yet another placid, deceptively unassuming day of labor for the wealthy LA Barris family Marianne (Miranda Otto), Peter (Noah Wyle) and their two children, as working single mother Ana (Vanessa Benavente) arrives to perform her regular cleaning chores. But this time taking along her rebellious Americanized teenage son Nico (Ezekiel Pacheco), to seemingly coach him in the humility and obedience that has enabled her to survive her insecure existence plaguing her, while Nico has been growing up here.

But the uneventful round of stultifying chores throughout the palatial home is interrupted when ICE police rounding up suspected undocumented workers around the neighborhood, knock at the door. Marianne panics and convinces the family to hide out in the cellar for their own safety for hours, or subsequently even endless days, But is it self-serving fear that her own family will be charged with harboring the undocumented. Not to mention the cellar door that is locked from the outside, and Nico's own simmering suspicions that they may be in fact victims of that notorious domestic worker servitude captivity.

In any case, as these multiple scenarios progressively and relentlessly raise the dramatic class and racial tensions and psychological horror to a fevered pitch, that to say more would dampen the smoldering proceedings masterfully conceived by young Latino LA based writer/director Augustus Meleo Bernstein, produced by Colombian filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia, son of the late eminent writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez - and inspired by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, "without whom I wouldn't be a filmmaker." Suffice it to say that the surprise subversive conclusion to these proceedings lends a breathlessly euphoric irreverence to the notion of escapism in movies.

At The Gates Review, Rotten Tomatoes

Prairie Miller