Episode
18
Criterion Spine #0
Lone Star
John Sayles, 1996 · with Domino R. Perez
“Forget the Alamo.”
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Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is investigating a decades-old murder in his small Texas border town, one that leads him straight back to the legend of his own father, the legendary former sheriff Buddy Deeds. As Sam pulls at the threads of the past, John Sayles weaves together the intertwined lives of the town's Anglo, Mexican American, and Black communities across generations. Sprawling, generous, and quietly radical in its view of the borderlands, Lone Star is a mystery that becomes a meditation on how history, inherited and buried alike, shapes the people living on top of it.
Domino R. Perez is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a scholar of Latina/o and Chicana/o folklore, literature, and film. She wrote the liner-notes essay for the Criterion Collection's release of Lone Star and is the author of several books on Mexican American folklore and identity.