My review of The Burial, which opens tomorrow, is at Slant:
There’s a story of thrillingly righteous indignation sitting at the core of Maggie Betts’s The Burial. This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs. The high points are delivered primarily by Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones, who make a good effort to fill in the gaps left by the spotty screenplay…
Here’s the trailer:
In the quasi-Western The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones plays a claims-jumper in 1850s Nebraska who gets roped into helping a tough-minded spinster (Hilary Swank) cart three insane women to safety in Iowa. Jones, who looks less and less comfortable in modern garb these days, also directed and co-wrote the screenplay.
The Homesman opens this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
“I live uncommonly alone,” says Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) in Tommy Lee Jones’ adaptation of Glendon Swarthout’s novel about a raw frontier where solitude and madness are constant companions. The Homesman tries to cut a mordant, witty Coen Brothers line between tragedy and comedy and can’t quite manage either. More particularly, it never knows quite what to make of Cuddy, who is at once valorized as a heroically staunch figure and at the same time mocked for her stiff manner and panicky ways…
Here’s the trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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