SOURCE: West, Joan M., and Dennis West. Review of Lone Star, by John Sayles. Cineaste 22, no. 3 (December 1996): 34-6.

In the following review, West and West discuss Sayles's representation of competing ethnic groups in Lone Star, contending that the film offers a realistic picture of the current state of multicultural America.

Lone Star is writer-director-editor John Sayles's film version of menudo, the hearty and picante tripe stew popular in Mexico's northern states. Into his stewpot Sayles pours one-third modern Western, one-third love story with a twist, and one-third murder mystery; he stirs these ingredients briskly with a strong ensemble cast in dozens of speaking roles. The result is a realistic portrait of a Texas border town, Frontera (i.e., ‘border’), where in the 1990s workaday people of different ethnicities face difficult social problems as they grapple with questions of history, identity, economic and political power, education, and the future...