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The film Sunset Limited is an HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s play of the same name, and it is an in-depth character study of two individuals: Black (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and White (played by Tommy Lee Jones). In the beginning of the film, Black has already saved White from committing suicide and they are sitting together at a small, round kitchen table; viewers learn that Black was going to work when he saw White on the train platform about ready to jump in front of the Sunset Limited. Black is a religious Christian and White is an outright atheist; one believes in Jesus Christ and one believes in nothing; one has faith and one has no faith in anything. These ideological standpoints (the lack of an ideology is still an ideology) are the foundation of this text. The focus of Suset Limited is the push and pull between religious belief (Black) and philosophical thought (White), which ultimately will determine whether White stays and decides to live, or goes and decides to take his life. In essence, Sunset Limited is an exercise in rhetoric, in the art of persuasion, and how this artform can be used in both religious and secular conversation. This study of Sunset Limited will devote time to Cormac McCarthy’s connections to religion and philosophy using research about his work; then, there will be an in-depth textual analysis of the film, which will speak to not only who these characters are but also what they want to relay to one another about what they know (rather than what they believe) about the world. Black and White are polar opposites of each other (black and white); what this essay intends to prove is that there are similarities to their thought processes, even if they may not recognize it.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (2023)—a poignant depiction of migrants’ experiences on the Polish-Belarusian frontier—and two Hollywood films that address migration across the U.S.–Mexico border: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and the experimental short Flesh and Sand (Carne y Arena). The analysis shows that, when read alongside these American texts, Holland’s film employs similar tropes and visual conventions to explore borders, migration, and hospitality, yet it departs from Hollywood models by foregrounding the moral dilemmas of border activism and presenting a naturalistic portrayal of the trauma of irregular border crossings. Although Green Border was not directly influenced by cinematic representations of the U.S.–Mexico border crisis, it nonetheless draws on discursive strategies that contribute to a broader interpretive framework for understanding global border crises. Migration films increasingly reflect the globalized nature of mobility, illustrating how intensifying movement disrupts and reconfigures local institutions and communities.