Directed by:
John SaylesScreenplay:
John SaylesCinematography:
Stuart DryburghComposer:
Mason DaringCast:
Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña, Oni Faida Lampley, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Joe Morton, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Ron Canada, Tony Plana (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border. (Criterion)
(more)Reviews (2)
A film that starts off looking like a thriller, something along the lines of The Silence of the Lambs, but after a while, it changes and you're watching something very similar to the comic "Scalped." It has a similar intensity and deals with similar themes, where you also get a fairly interesting case, the point of which is quite unexpected, although not directly disarming.
()
Lone Star is supposedly one of the movies I should have on my bucket list. But it’s also one of the most boring movies ever; I was scared that I was gonna die of boredom. And I admit that the premise is clear. It introduces you to a white European and compares them to everybody else. The result was supposed to be the fact that we’re all equal, but not everybody in this movie seems to accept that. The rules in this movie are set in stone. On one side, there are racists that would dress up in a Ku Klux Klan robe if they could. And on the other side, there is the rest, fighting for their rights. And somewhere in-between is a Lone Star, walking on a very tense tightrope. A shame. I expected this to have a whole different energy. Based on an interesting story, there’s this absolutely mediocre, even below-average protagonist.
()