SOURCE: Combs, Richard. “Re-Touch of Evil.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4881 (18 October 1996): 20.

In the following review of Lone Star, Combs maintains that Sayles is unable to handle the scope of a story involving so many plots and subplots.

“Forget the Alamo”, says the heroine of John Sayles's Lone Star, reversing the battle cry that has been part of American folklore ever since the Alamo mission was defended by a handful of independence-seeking Texans against a Mexican army in 1836. The heroine, Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), is Mexican-American, a schoolteacher in a small town on the Texas border with Mexico, and she knows something about the historical divide between the white and Hispanic communities. The latter has remained the larger, it is pointed out, even after Texas separated from Mexico; it is also suggested that one reason Texas fought to become a state was so that it could join the slave-owning...