One Paragraph Movie Review: Lone Star

Three hundred and thirty-second film: Lone Star, a 1996 sort-of murder mystery sort-of western sort-of romance that is okay when you’re watching it and incredible once it finishes and you’ve thought about it a bit. When you’re watching it, it’s about lots of lives interconnecting in a racially diverse Texan border town while the sheriff figures out who’s responsible for a long-dead corrupt lawmaker’s skeleton found in the desert. When it’s finished, it’s about three blokes trying to figure out how they feel about their dads, and it’s very, very much about revisionist history. Revisions are made to the initiators and victors of racial conflicts, the background of immigrants, and military politics, as decades intersect via the characters’ flashback memories. And then. Then the two main characters — the current sheriff and his old high school girlfriend, decide that if everybody else is deciding which bits of history are important and which are not, then they can ignore the fact that they just found out they’re half-siblings and keep on rooting. It’s shocking. It makes everything you’ve just watched resolve into an astounding movie. And Matthew McConaughey is hot in it. I… I still don’t know what I think. Three bar-back critical race theory museums out of five.