Sin Nombre (2009 Mexico 96 min, dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga, cast: Edgar Flores, Paulina Gaitan).

Hollywood calls a director like Cary Fukunaga “a shooter.” In private screening rooms, card rooms at Hillcrest, and The Grill in BH, “a shooter” is said with the kind of reverence the Mafia reserves for a stealthy hit man.

Shooters know how to make the lean, mean, visual pictures (that means “films” in Hollywood) that have been the high art of American cinema since John Ford made his first Western. Cary Fukunaga got attention when he did a short called Victoria para Chino about Mexican immigrants left in a truck in Texas to die. Sin Nombre (translation: Without a Name) explores more of the subculture he got to know while growing up in various places from Oakland to Japan to France to Mexico City to New York.

Sin Nombre is tough, sinewy, and as relentless as the train that drives the rhythm of the story. A Mexican drug gang is the background for a classic film noir that would probably have starred someone like Paul Muni if it had been made by Warner Brothers during the classic gangster film era.

Casper saves Sayra from rape by killing the boss of his gang while they rob helpless migrants atop a train bound for the US. He knows the gang will not stop until he is dead. It is not dying that frightens him, he confesses, but not knowing when or where it will come. It comes at the very instant they are almost across the border. He dies, she goes on to a new life, mourning her love.

This is a tale usually told amid wars and revolutions. Perhaps that is part of Fukunaga’s message: there is an unseen rising that moves toward our border with the slow deliberateness of a freight train. It carries a human cargo that possesses nothing more than hope . Watch the movie, and watch the next from Cary Fukunaga, the shooter.