Pride of Place: John Sayles's Five Best Movies

More than any other great American filmmaker, John Sayles builds his multivoiced narratives around physical spaces of both community and wilderness. His greatest works involve populating a compact world with diverse characters and seeing how they interact with each other and the spaces they share. This dedication to physical geography and the accompanying human geography it spawns and nourishes clearlry has influenced some exemplary visual works of recent years, including the television programs Deadwood and especially The Wire. These five films are the best examples of Sayles’s cinematic mappings. Unforftunately, the site has...