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The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea Available Now!

Well everyone, today is the day. My first novel, The Adventures of the Thin Man and Andrea is now available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

This one took a while—written in fits and starts, in bars and hotel lobbies here in Kyoto—but it finally found its shape. More than anything, today I just want to thank all the readers of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, wherever you hail from; I’ve always thought of this as an ongoing conversation, and a lot of this book grew out of that exchange.

If you do pick it up, I hope you enjoy the ride—and if it lands for you, a quick review on Amazon would mean a great deal. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Matt

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On Why Sicario Is the Greatest Film of the 2010s

Note: This essay reflects on the film Sicario and its place within the cinema of the 2010s. It is written in the spirit of cultural criticism rather than formal film scholarship. My aim is not to produce a definitive ranking of the decade’s films, but to articulate why Sicario stands out as a particularly revealing work about power, violence, and the uneasy moral landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

The film’s depiction of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the covert war against drug cartels resonated strongly with me because it refuses many of the narrative comforts typical of American action cinema. Instead of heroic triumphs or clear moral resolutions, Sicario presents a world in which institutional power often operates through ambiguous methods and morally troubling compromises.

In that sense the film belongs to a small tradition of American cinema willing to look directly at the realities of U.S. involvement in Latin America. An earlier example is Salvador, which similarly attempted to depict American policy in the region without the usual patriotic framing.

Readers who disagree with the claim that Sicario is the greatest film of the 2010s are very much invited to do so. Film arguments are part of the pleasure of cinephile culture. The claim here is intentionally bold because bold claims tend to produce interesting conversations.

At the very least, the border extraction sequence alone earns Sicario a place among the most unforgettable cinematic moments of the past decade.

I first watched Sicario on Netflix.

Which is not the way great films are supposed to enter one’s life. Great films are meant to arrive in dark theaters, on enormous screens, in the company of strangers who feel the tension at the same moment you do. Netflix, by contrast, offers films casually, like items on a digital buffet.

But sometimes a movie survives even that.

Sicario does.

Within half an hour it becomes clear that the film is operating at a different frequency from most thrillers. The dialogue is spare. The pacing is deliberate. The camera lingers on landscapes and silences. Something about the atmosphere suggests that the story is heading somewhere morally uncomfortable.

Then comes the border crossing.

The Extraction

The convoy moves slowly toward the border crossing at Juárez. The mission seems straightforward: extract a prisoner from Mexico and return him to the United States. The vehicles move through traffic in tight formation. Nothing dramatic is happening yet.

And yet everything feels wrong. Cars begin to surround the convoy. Drivers stare from their windshields. Traffic slows to a crawl. The camera—guided by the extraordinary eye of Roger Deakins—cuts between glances, mirrors, steering wheels, hands resting near weapons. The tension builds with almost mathematical precision.

What makes the scene so powerful is not the violence itself but the certainty of its arrival. Everyone in the vehicles understands what is about to happen. The operators watch the surrounding cars with an eerie calm, as if they are simply waiting for a timer to run out.

Disaster is not possible. It is inevitable.

When the gunfire finally erupts it is sudden, efficient, and disturbingly professional. The scene ends almost as quickly as it began.

By the time the convoy crosses back into the United States, the viewer understands that the film is not interested in the usual heroics of the crime thriller. It is interested in something darker.

The Line Between Law and Power

Part of what makes Sicario extraordinary is the way it gradually dissolves the moral categories the audience expects.

Emily Blunt’s character, FBI agent Kate Macer, begins the film believing she is participating in a legitimate law enforcement operation. But as the mission unfolds, she begins to realize that the institutions she represents are operating according to rules that have very little to do with the law.

The key figure in this realization is the relaxed, almost cheerful CIA operative called Matt Graver played by Josh Brolin.

Graver is one of the film’s most fascinating characters because he openly blurs the lines between legality and strategy. He treats the war against the cartels not as a legal battle but as a geopolitical game in which certain rules simply no longer apply.

He jokes. He smiles. He reassures Kate that everything is under control. And yet the deeper the operation goes, the clearer it becomes that the “control” he represents has very little to do with justice.

Alejandro

If Matt Graver represents the pragmatic face of American power, Alejandro, played wonderfully by Benicio Del Toro, represents something older and more elemental. Alejandro is not a police officer or a soldier in any conventional sense. He is a weapon deployed inside the machinery of the state.

His presence reveals the film’s central truth: the war on drugs, as depicted here, is not really about drugs. It is about power, revenge, and the maintenance of geopolitical equilibrium through violence.

The final dinner-table scene—quiet, controlled, almost polite—delivers one of the most chilling moments in modern cinema.

Alejandro does not rage. He simply completes the task.

A Film Without Illusions

The reason Sicario stands above most films of the 2010s is that it refuses to decorate its subject with comforting illusions.

American cinema has often struggled to portray U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with any degree of honesty. Films frequently soften the narrative with patriotic framing or moral reassurance. Sicario does the opposite.

In that sense it belongs to a small tradition of films willing to examine American power without the usual gloss. One earlier example is
Salvador.

Like Salvador, Sicario presents U.S. involvement in the politics and violence of the region not as a heroic intervention but as a complicated and morally ambiguous system of influence.

The film does not sermonize about this reality. It simply shows it.

The Craft

What elevates the film from strong political thriller to masterpiece is its extraordinary craftsmanship. Director Denis Villeneuve constructs the story with remarkable restraint. Exposition is minimal. Dialogue is sparse. Much of the narrative unfolds through mood and implication rather than explanation.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns the borderlands into a stark visual landscape of highways, deserts, and shadowy tunnels.

And the score by Jóhann Jóhannsson provides the film’s subterranean heartbeat—deep, rumbling tones that feel less like music than like distant artillery beneath the earth.

Together these elements create an atmosphere that is almost hypnotic.

The Film of the Decade

Every decade produces films that entertain, and a smaller number that capture the psychological mood of their time. Sicario belongs to the second category.

The 2010s were a decade in which institutions increasingly appeared opaque, power operated through indirect mechanisms, and the line between legality and strategy often seemed disturbingly thin.

Sicario does not attempt to solve these problems. It simply looks at them without flinching.

And that honesty may be precisely why it stands as the greatest film of its decade.

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On Projection

This piece grows out of a pattern I kept noticing across very different areas of life — music, institutions, relationships, even small domestic moments. The common thread was projection: the quiet human habit of deciding who someone is before we actually know them.

Most of the trouble people cause each other doesn’t begin with malice. It begins with projection. A quick glance, a flash of confidence, a moment of competence, and the mind rushes in to fill the rest of the story. We decide who someone is long before we know them, then spend the next several interactions quietly forcing reality to match the role we’ve already written. The strange part is how automatic it feels. Projection moves faster than curiosity. By the time the real person arrives, the character has already been cast.

Artists have always understood this better than psychologists. Warren Zevon could compress the entire phenomenon into a sideways moment — a smirk from a hotel bellboy, a glance that tells you someone has already decided what kind of person you must be. That small misreading carries a particular sting. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s casual. A stranger assigning you a part in a play you never auditioned for.

The same mechanism runs everywhere. Romantic life is the most obvious theater. People meet someone who carries a certain kind of presence — confidence, magnetism, calm — and projection fills in the rest. One person sees mystery, another sees danger, another sees salvation. Rarely does anyone pause long enough to discover the ordinary human being standing behind the projection screen.

But romance is only the loudest version of the phenomenon. The quieter version appears in institutions. Walk into any functioning organization and you will see it immediately. Certain people get labeled early: the fixer, the visionary, the difficult one, the safe pair of hands. Once the role has been assigned, the institution stops looking carefully. Evidence that confirms the role is absorbed instantly; evidence that contradicts it tends to drift past unnoticed.

Competence is particularly vulnerable to this kind of projection. Once people notice that you can solve problems, the problems begin moving toward you almost by gravity. It rarely happens maliciously. More often it unfolds through a thousand small assumptions: they’ll handle it, they’re good at this, they don’t seem bothered. Over time the projection becomes structural. You wake up one day and realize the role people see when they look at you has quietly become the architecture of your work.

The same thing happens in subtler ways in personal life. A confident woman becomes a symbol of availability. A calm man becomes the emotional ballast of every room he enters. Someone who listens well becomes the designated interpreter of other people’s feelings. None of these roles are entirely false, but they are rarely complete. The projection flattens the person into a function.

And yet every now and then something rare happens. The projection stops.

Sometimes it happens in a team that has matured enough to recognize its own weight. Work begins moving horizontally instead of downhill. Problems get solved in real time without automatically searching for the usual backstop. The structure starts holding itself.

Sometimes it happens in friendship, where someone listens closely enough to hear the difference between energy and intention.

Sometimes it happens at home, in the quiet choreography of daily life — laundry hung, dinner made, small responsibilities passed back and forth without ceremony. No one performing a role. Just two people moving through the same system with mutual awareness.

Recognition, when it appears, is strangely quiet. It doesn’t arrive with speeches or dramatic declarations. More often it shows up as the absence of pressure — the sudden realization that you no longer have to play the character someone else wrote for you.

That absence can feel almost physical. A lightness in the room. A small shift in gravity.

Most of life still runs on projection. It’s simply too efficient a mental shortcut to disappear entirely. Human beings read surfaces quickly and fill in the rest. We build stories because the world moves too fast to wait for full understanding.

But every once in a while the projection drops and something more accurate takes its place. Someone sees you clearly. Or a system finally distributes its weight the way it should have all along.

Those moments are easy to miss because they are not dramatic. They feel almost ordinary.

But if you pay attention, they carry a quiet form of relief: the sense that for a brief stretch of time, at least, you are no longer acting in someone else’s script.

Dedication

For those rare moments when the projection dissolves and the real person gets to stand in the room.