m-sileo

It's a thriller that starts with a very clear idea: police blue against the red of danger. The entire film moves between those two colors, as if they were opposing forces clashing over and over again, and the blood in the foreground reminds us that no one gets out unscathed.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan, a strong and competent woman who still has to defend herself because no one around her is willing or able to do it. Megan has just graduated from the academy, and on her first day she stops a supermarket robbery. But the gun -that sort of patriarchal totem- ends up in the hands of Ron Silver's character, a stockbroker who snaps and turns into a serial killer. From that moment on, the film becomes a cat-and-mouse game with one of the most threatening villains I can remember.

The movie leans heavily on the idea of a tough female protagonist who runs head-on into institutionalized misogyny. Megan is harassed and questioned not just by her stalker, but also by her superiors and even her father. She wants to be a cop, she's proud of it, but the system that should protect her is completely useless. That's why she breaks every rule: revenge is the only thing she has left to regain a minimum sense of control.

Bigelow builds a striking aesthetic: neon, deep blues, blurred backgrounds, and the sense that New York is wrapped in an almost abstract haze. Visually, Megan is always boxed in-filmed behind bars, windows, or frames that shrink her within the shot, especially when Eugene is nearby. It makes clear that the city, the police force, and even her own family are structures that crush her.

The gun, moreover, is not just a weapon: it's a symbol. For Megan, it's part of the job; for Eugene, it's a prosthesis for a lost masculinity, the object that allows him to feel powerful in a world that bores him. His obsession with Megan comes from there-from not being able to tolerate that a woman has taken a place he considers his own.

Between the visual, the symbolic, and the visceral, Blue Steel works as a powerful, intense, and fairly brutal thriller. And despite a few narrative excesses, it offers an interesting reading of how a woman tries to claim power in a world designed to take it away from her.

A subtle and powerful portrait of Chilean classism, built from small gestures and everyday tensions. The film opens with an unsettling scene: Julia, a six-year-old girl, thrown into a crystal-clear pool while her nanny, Estela, watches from the edges-always present, yet never fully acknowledged.

Estela is the emotional core: a complex, mysterious, intelligent figure who is never reduced to the role of victim. Her bond with Julia-tender, intimate, and at times cruel-forms a "family within a family," exposing the contradictions of the household where she lives and works.

With no heroes or villains, the violence emerges in the details: a classist remark, a small reprimand, the indifference of those who assume Estela is always available. Director Sotomayor avoids the usual clichés of films about domestic labor and opts for an honest, restrained, deeply human perspective.

A small film that surprises with its clarity and the way it exposes, without grand gestures, the social fractures running through it.