It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts in a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here with Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, and Genevieve Gatsky.

Here on The Next Picture Show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context.

So every other week, we get together to talk over classic film and consider how it relates

to a current movie.

This week, we're getting a front row seat to history with two political thrillers that recreate

the past with a scrupulous attention to detail.

One is the Battle of Algiers.

The other is a battle at the Algiers.

Tasha, could you tell us more?

Okay. So Catherine Bigelow's new film, Detroit,

is her latest collaboration with journalist-turned screenwriter Mark Boll, who wrote her last two movies, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark 30. All three films are fact-based thrillers that use a

journalistic research process and documentary-like a media see to bring the past to life as vividly as possible.

Detroit takes place during the 1967 riots in the city of the title, but it ultimately

zeroes in on an incident at the annex of the Algiers Motel, where a response to an alleged sniper

fire turns into a tragic microcosm of the tension between black citizens and a racist police

force.

The heightened realism of Bigelow and Bowles approach owes a debt to Gilo Porticovo's 1966 film in the Battle of Algiers, which covers another volatile historical moment

with a newsreel quality that lends legitimacy to its point of view.

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