Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When brash Texas border officer Mike Norton wrongfully kills and buries the friend and ranch hand of Pete Perkins, the latter is reminded of a promise he made to bury his friend, Melquiades Estrada, in his Mexican home town. He kidnaps Norton and exhumes Estrada's corpse, and the odd caravan sets out on horseback for Mexico.
Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut is a quietly extraordinary neo-western that earns high marks across the board. The fractured, non-linear narrative structure gives the familiar border-country material a genuinely fresh literary texture, and the performances — Jones himself, Barry Pepper, and Julio Cedillo — are uncommonly raw and lived-in. Emmanuel Lubezki's sun-bleached, dust-choked cinematography of the Trans-Pecos landscape is stunning. The film's conception — part road movie, part moral parable, part elegy — is singular enough to rate highly on Novelty. The ending, while thematically coherent and emotionally honest, is deliberately muted and somewhat inconclusive, which suits the film's tone but leaves it the least fully satisfying element of an otherwise remarkable work.