JG Ballard writes about Hollywood disaster movies and the American unconscious at the Guardian:

Every American fear and paranoid anxiety is out in the open, from the ranting of ultra-right shockjocks to The Day after Tomorrow, Hollywood's latest attempt to traumatise us with fears of climate change. Here, global warming melts the polar ice-caps, flooding our planet and plunging us into a global catastrophe. The computerised special effects are more real than reality itself, bypassing many areas of the brain and posing problems for philosophers and neuro-psychologists alike, hinting at a future where the human race abandons "old" reality in the same way that Americans abandoned old Europe.

The Guardian's Dan Glaister also reports on a new film about the Latino "underclass" in Los Angeles called Un Día Sin Mexicanos (A Day Without Mexicans):

"On May 14," runs the poster's tagline, "there will be no Mexicans in California." The tagline for the Spanish language version of the poster reads: "Los gringos van a llorar" ("The gringos are going to cry").

The film, based on a short of the same name by the same director, sees California wake up one day to find a third of its population has disappeared. "Have they been taken by extraterrestrials?" asks one expert. "Is it the Apocalypse, and they are the chosen ones?" Or perhaps they have simply tired of not being valued.