“They’re Just People”

Farmville, Virginia, population 8,140, is home to the largest private immigrant detention center on the East Coast. Connie Koski and Renee Gutiérrez bring their students to the detention center to teach English, but the students are also learning a valuable lesson about the people who come to this country looking for a better life.

Egan Green grew up listening to the stories of game wardens and wandering rural Appalachia. Now, he helps track down the poachers ‘telephoning’ fish and selling bear gallbladders to China.

There is a growing negative reaction to what many people perceive as gratuitous violence in film and television. Thomas Britt investigates why audiences are turning off shows with violent content like “The Walking Dead.”

Flip open a German pulp novel, and you’re likely to find a detective who doesn’t shoot a gun or break the law. Bruce Campbell explains why the weight of the Nazi past makes a German Dirty Harry an impossibility.

As Japanese filmmakers brought Godzilla back over and over again, they have used the monster as a symbol to reveal central public concerns in Japan at the time. Jason Barr is the author of The Kaiju Film: A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters, which looks at the history of Japanese monster movies.