At the beginning of Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic" the most exciting and complexly imagined American movie of the year two members of the Mexican state police wait in a car in the middle of the bright-yellow desert outside Tijuana. A mysterious airplane lands near the men, Javier(Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo(Jacob Vargas), and soon a truck drives away from the landing area. The policemen pull the truck over, demand a bribe from the passengers, then wait for them to reach for their wallets.

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