Lone Star (1996) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: John Sayles
Starring: Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, Stephen Mendillo, Elizabeth Peña, Oni Faida Lampley

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.

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