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 neo western mystery. He received an Oscar nomination for the film’s masterful screenplay, which slides from the past to the present. 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. When Sam reencounters his high school flame (Elizabeth Peña), it becomes clear that secrets from the past can’t stay buried forever. Sayles’s masterful film, novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border.