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These movies are not tickets to escapism. If you don’t want more proof that some people’s (too many people’s) lives are way too hard, don’t watch them. But you should watch them, and you should bring friends. And tissues.

LA MISMA LUNA (Under the Same Moon)

A mother and son through a week of their respective journeys to be reunited across borders, despite all who stand in their way (be they La Migra, exploitative employers, police, or even folks trying to help). Bonus: this film has one of the best nine-year-old actors I have ever seen.

STOP-LOSS

A soldier and his fellows as they return from Iraq to civilian life, only to find that the President has “stop-lossed” them, sending them back to Iraq, regardless of whatever they have to say about the matter.

These two movies deal with different communities facing different battles, and yet their core features, which make them great movies, are shared:

1. They’re both really good movies.

2. They have strong female characters.

3. They show that the government is not always our friend.

4. They pull you in one way and then another, ripping your heart along with you, so much that you never know just how things will turn out.

5. Some of the saddest characters are the ones I would least expect.

6. They give glimpses of worlds rarely portrayed with such richness in movies: the nuts and bolts of the US economy in the former, the mortar fire on the ground in the Iraq war in the latter.

7. They both present the real life decisions we have to make (or we don’t have to make - in which case, we should be wondering why we don’t).

8. You should really see them both. But maybe not on consecutive nights - I speak from experience on that.