Review: Tommy Lee Jones' Unruly 'The Homesman' With Hilary Swank, Meryl Streep, And More

This is a reprint of our review from the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Eight years ago (gosh, was it really that long?), Tommy Lee Jones made his long-awaited feature directorial debut with the contemporary neo-western “The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada.” The film premiered at Cannes, and proved a big hit there, winning a Best Actor trophy for Jones, and a Best Screenplay prize for “Babel” scribe Guillermo Arriaga. But the film never quite found an audience outside the Croisette, and perhaps for that reason, the only thing that Jones has made in the meantime was a modest HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Sunset Limited.”

Until now, anyway. The actor-director is back at Cannes with “The Homesman,” an adaptation of the novel by Glendon Swarthout, and while ‘Three Burials’ certainly nodded at the Western, this is the full-fat version, full of settlers and pioneers and wagons and Indians. It’s also a much less fully-formed and complete picture than...