After the bones of a despised former sheriff are exhumed in the desert of a Texas town near the Mexican border, the current sheriff (Chris Cooper) begins to unearth a network of secrets kept by the locals. Featuring an ensemble of fully lived-in performances by Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey, and Elizabeth Peña, among the very finest films in the storied career of the great American independent filmmaker John Sayles, Lone Star is an intricately staged, spellbinding neo-western set in a finely shaded world of psychologically complex characters, and one of cinema’s most searing portraits of border town politics.