“Detroit” is not a beautiful film. It’s rough, it’s violent, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s also absolutely necessary.

In July of 1967, the city of Detroit spent five days enduring the 12th Street Riot, sparked by the raid of an unlicensed bar in a black neighborhood by a mostly white police force with a lengthy history of brutality and discrimination. Barely three days after that raid, countless buildings had been burned to the ground, dozens had died, and a state of emergency had been declared, in hopes that thousands of Army and National Guard troops would be enough to stifle the unrest. Amid the chaos, several young residents sought refuge in the Algiers Motel and a house that had been annexed to the building. When nearby police heard gunfire (later discovered to be from a starter pistol) from the building they indiscriminately fired at it, stormed in, lined the patrons against a wall, then prejudicially interrogated and assaulted them for hours. By morning, three teenagers at the motel were dead.

The night in the Algiers is where Kathryn Bigalow’s (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) film spends the bulk of its nearly two and a half hour runtime. It’s a challenging story to tell, between the complicated historical context in which the event is set and how eyewitness accounts conflicted with official reports from the police involved. Partnering again with screenwriter Mark Boal, Bigalow’s film is at once large in scale and intimate, offering us an overview of the city’s racial tensions that led to that fateful night before it pushes into the lives of those involved as the story coalesces.

However, “Detroit” is not a character study, nor does it need to be. We don’t need to delve wholly into any single character to feel their pain, as the gut-wrenching way the events unfold inside the motel are more than enough to engage anyone with a sense of humanity. As with Zero Dark Thirty (and unlike The Hurt Locker), the film puts us alongside the individuals involved, rather than in their heads, allowing the film to give us some much needed context. If we were limited to the headspace of a single character, the film would not be able to pull back far enough to show us the relevancy of the riot, the multitude of individuals involved, and the abominably biased investigation and trial that ensued afterwards. It’s crucial that the film be able to do this: The systemic issues that fed into the Algiers Motel incident are lessons we need to remember, as is the terrifying power of unchecked discrimination. Bigalow’s film shows us both, unflinchingly.

It’s that lack of flinching that has created the most controversy.

“Detroit” does not shy away from violence, and with Barry Ackroyd’s fly-on-the-wall cinematography, you may as well be in the room yourself. It’s a relentlessly uncomfortable space, made all the more so by the monstrous police officer commanding the proceedings (played to chilling effect by Will Poulter). Leads Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Hannah Murray, and Anthony Mackie all give engrossing performances, with Smith and Latimore particularly top-notch as teens-turned-aspiring-Motown-singers, and it’s heartbreakingly real to watch their characters’ innocence smashed so effortlessly by the powers that be.

However, “Detroit” does falter after the Algiers incident. In reality, the court proceedings were a mess of lies, conflicting accounts, and judiciary bias that lasted months; it would easily take an additional film to fully cover the community’s outrage at seeing police brutality and prejudice excused in such public fashion. “Detroit” haphazardly tries to shove all of that into the last half hour of its runtime, rendering the final act dramatically underwhelming, especially given the intensity of what came before in the motel.

Many of us have never had to experience anything even remotely like the 12th Street Riot or the discrimination that led to it, and some of us will never know what it truly feels like to spend a lifetime being oppressed while the world watches on, indifferent. “Detroit” won’t change that, but it’s a blunt reminder of how quickly things descend into physical terrorism when ignorance is given power and when ideas of racial superiority are allowed to fester. The events at the Algiers took place fifty years ago, but they could not be more relevant today.

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Before The Revenant was launched to the forefront of Hollywood this winter as a critical and box office success, the story of Hugh Glass already had a reputation in Hollywood: It was impossible to shoot.

The exact details of Glass’s experience as a fur-trapper in 1823 are subject to much debate, but the legend goes that while on an expedition with General William Ashley in South Dakota, Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear. Fearing the worst and unable to haul a corpse from deep in the wilderness, Glass’s companions left him for dead and continued on their expedition. Despite his severe injuries, Glass came to, crawling and stumbling his way to safety alone on a 200 mile trek to Fort Kiowa.

A tale of isolation and wilderness survival might work well in a novel (Michael Punke penned the book upon which The Revenant is based) but it’s difficult at best to translate into cinematic form, and The Revenant sat in production limbo for nearly a decade before the script found its way to screenwriter Mark Smith. Even after Alejandro Iñárritu signed on to direct in 2011, it took another three years for filming to begin. Was it worth the wait? Unquestionably.

The world of The Revenant is as stark, hostile and bleak as it should be. Even as Glass puts distance between himself and his grave, getting ever closer to the men who left him behind, there’s rarely a moment of reprieve. That unrelenting atmosphere keeps you perfectly uncomfortable for the duration of the film, drawing you ever-closer to Glass as he fights his own mental and physical destruction. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Glass is unnervingly convincing; not just as the victim of a bear attack (kudos to the production team for creating cinema’s first believable mauling), but as a man who has lost all but the most primal human instincts of survival and revenge.

For all the well-deserved attention given to DiCaprio, Tom Hardy’s performance as John Fitzgerald is also noteworthy for its nuance (despite the somewhat heavy-handed frontiersman voice) in that you can’t help but feel the deep-seated fear that he attempts to hide but which ultimately leads to his abandonment of Glass. Will Poulter’s impressive take on a young Jim Bridger is also worth mentioning, as is Domhnall Gleeson’s portrayal of Andrew Henry, the conflicted leader of the expedition.

The performances would all be for naught though, if it weren’t for Emmanuel Lubezki’s absolutely breathtaking cinematography. Few films in recent memory have captured such isolated beauty in any meaningful sense, but with Iñárritu’s direction, Lubezki goes above and beyond. Gorgeously cold footage of the mountains and forest aside, the film is littered with shots that run upwards of five minutes before cutting, allowing you to be fully enveloped in scenes that were already utterly intense. Only natural lighting and entirely real (mostly very remote) locations were used, including the Kootenai Falls just across the Montana border. It was a daunting task that put it over-budget and over-schedule, but those hardships made The Revenant the film that it is: An unflinching look at what it means to die, and then survive.

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I’m in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the screen shows a wiry older man with frizzy white hair toting a rifle and spouting racial slurs as he strolls through a rural town elsewhere in the state. After finally seeing the full film, I can certainly feel for that other theatergoer.

The story of Leith is one that strikes a uncomfortably familiar chord for many in Idaho and Montana. I grew up in Montana in the 1990’s, a time when the Patriot movement was grasping at the backwoods of the state in towns like Jordan. There, the Montana Freemen tried to form their own anti-government township in 1996, but were ultimately arrested after a tense standoff with the FBI. Just down the road from my hometown was the north Idaho area, where the white supremacists in the Aryan Nations were headquartered until 2001. Militia movements and white power groups intertwined for much of the ’90s in this part of the world, a cancerous presence that disturbed those who had the misfortune to live near it. The footage of a man in the street, armed and full of hate, is an eerie reminder of one of the most regrettable phases of history in the Northwest.

That man is Craig Cobb, the central figure of “Welcome To Leith.” In 2012, Cobb moved to the secluded town of Leith, North Dakota, which boasts a mere 24 citizens and sits 15 minutes away from the county seat of Carson (pop. 293). Leith is roughly ninety minutes away from the state capital of Bismarck, the nearest “real” city, and is a dot of civilization with only a handful of properties. When Cobb moved in, his intention was to purchase as many plots of land as he could in order to build a haven for white nationalists. It was a plan that came dangerously close to working as more of Cobb’s ilk moved in, and the filmmakers behind “Welcome to Leith” stuck themselves right in the middle of it.

In fact, the “middle of it” is where the films starts and stays. Cobb’s presence in the town grows as he buys up land, but even as the few families that live there become frightened and angry, the films spends as much time with Cobb and his right-hand man Kynan Dutton- a scrawny Gulf War veteran with a poor Hitler mustache- as it does with those who want him out. Directors Michael Nichols and Christopher Walker describe filming with Cobb for the first half of the day, then literally walking across the street to film the neighbors for the second part of the day. The result is a film portraying the reality of life not just as a citizen next door, but as Cobb himself.

Soft-spoken and articulate with an easy smile, Craig Cobb is not what most imagine a devout racist to be. There’s an undeniable intelligence to the man who, at the surface, seems like your slightly-off uncle. But as the film delves deeper into his life it’s clear that a monster lies underneath, one that gleefully talks about the superiority of the white race, who screams anti-Semitic slurs at the opposition, and who spends the vast majority of his days online, stirring up support for his views in white supremacist forums.

Cobb’s true nature eventually led to safety concerns for local news crews covering developments in Leith, and was the reason a city police officer was present inside the screening room for every showing of the film in Bismarck over the course of three days. It’s one thing to be a hateful person, but as the film shows, it’s another to be one with ties to murky individuals who have no qualms about committing violent crimes. The film drips with that malevolent presence, and when combined with all the foreboding shots of a winter-clad Leith, it plays like a horror film.

Atmosphere aside, “Welcome to Leith” is at its most interesting when normal, law-abiding citizens are pushed to their moral limits by Cobb’s presence: Protesters from all over the state are shown rallying in Leith in one scene, a hopeful sight to be sure, but another scene has Dutton’s wife finding their vehicles vandalized and a citizen parked in their driveway refusing to leave, despite her repeated requests. You’re honestly not sure whose side to take: Can you blame anyone for wanting to retaliate against such a hateful group of people? Doubtful. But if hate begets harassment and violence, where does that leave our society? It’s in these moments, and there are plenty, where “Welcome to Leith” truly shines.

The film does suffer from its shoe-string, kickstarter-funded budget in places, with a few abrupt jumps over months of time, and it’s somewhat difficult to understand the geographic relationship of all the affected towns. These are minor issues though, and on the whole the documentary is not simply coherent, but thought-provoking. It’s a hugely successful endeavor.

“Welcome to Leith” is terrifying and provocative, a fly-on-the-wall documentary drenched in the atmosphere of a horror film. What does it all mean? As I walked out of the showing in Bismarck I could see, just down the street, the Motel 6 where Cobb spent the final few minutes of the film happily reading from a novel on white superiority. It was a reminder that this is not about some crazy thing that happened in a far-away place. It’s about that moment, as Ryan Lenz puts it in the film, “When the outside world that’s kept apart from much of rural America… Sort of came up through the soil.”

Hopefully, “Welcome to Leith” helps us understand how we can stop weeds like Cobb from growing in our communities.

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Over thirty years ago, George Miller used money he saved while working as an emergency doctor to fund his directorial debut, a violent Australian action film titled “Mad Max.” Shot for next to nothing, the film went on to set box office records, launching two legendary sequels that catapulted Mel Gibson to international stardom and influenced decades of post-apocalyptic media. How did Miller follow up such a gritty, highly-regarded trilogy? By producing and co-writing the acclaimed family films Babe and Happy Feet, as well as their sequels.

With Fury Road, Miller finally returns to the hellish world of Mad Max and despite all the talking animals between the Thunderdome and now, within minutes it’s clear that he’s still got plenty of brutal weirdness up his sleeve. After being caught by a group of marauders, Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself imprisoned by a desert-dwelling cult known as the “War Boys” just as one of their warrior drivers (Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron) goes rogue, freeing a group of enslaved women as she does. Max eventually finds himself fighting alongside Furiosa and the film takes off as they search for her home: The Green Place, a refuge of life in an otherwise barren, hostile world.

Plot descriptions do little justice to Fury Road: You have not seen a film like this before. Stylistically, it sits somewhere between steam-punk and western; a surreal combination of Speed and the Burning Man festival that’s both beautiful and absolutely out of its mind. It’s a two-hour chase at full-speed through the desert that constantly escalates, and just when you’re positive you won’t see anything more outlandish than a flame-throwing guitarist strapped to a wall of amplifiers on top of a semi going 80 miles an hour, Miller ups the ante even further. The fact that almost all of this is done without CGI makes the spectacle all the more jaw-dropping.

But beyond the dusty nightmarish spectacle lies what makes Fury Road truly special: Character. The film eschews Western outlaw cliches and allows issues of gender equality to take center stage, something rarely attempted in a big-budget action film, and accomplished here without being heavy-handed or under-played. There’s meat underneath the explosions, and it’s a testament to Theron and Hardy’s acting prowess (as well as the rest of the outstanding cast) that such heavy subtext can be present in a film that relies on insinuation and the faces of its characters more than their words.

Fury Road may take place in a universe established by Miller a lifetime ago, but it has plenty to say about the reality of today. A world of fire and blood has never been so hypnotic.

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