Today I saw The Manchurian Candidate and Maria Full of Grace with Shreyas and Mario.  Manchurian was well made.  I haven't seen the original but I've heard it's good.  The new update was suspenseful.  Given that the US here is in an election year, there were moments in the movie that were kind of creepy.  Everyone raves about Meryl Streep's performance -- which was very good, but Liev Schreiber's performance was also very good.  I think he had a difficult role to pull off.

Maria Full of Grace brought a different side of drug trafficking that made the film very intense and on a personal level.  The story is about a girl in Columbia who ends up serving as a mule to earn her family some money.  A mule is someone who carries drugs by swallowing pellets of drugs (size of a small sausage) that have been wrapped up (I think in plastic).  Anyway, because of her size she had to swallow 60+ pellets -- each giving her $100 USD.  The problem is that if the pellet ruptures while in transport the mule usually dies.

The star who plays Maria, Catalina Sandina Moreno, reminded me of a young Catherine Zeta-Jones.  This was apparently her first movie and not only was she in every scene, she was awesome.  We all walked out of the theater impressed with her performance.