Mexican with lots of Pepper

Three Burials is a dour but quirky, modern Western in the Sam Peckinpah mould, starring and directed by Tommy Lee Jones.

He plays Pete, an eccentric cowboy who goes bonkers when an obnoxious, white-trash border guard (Barry Pepper, splendidly nasty) accidentally kills Pete's best friend, a Mexican called Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo).

So Pete kidnaps the border guard, with a view to them taking his amigo's decomposing corpse across the border to Mexico and giving it a dignified burial in the country he loves.

This is a darkly comic, mythic parable, elegiacally photographed by Chris Menges. It's strong on atmosphere: you can almost smell the rotting Mexican and feel the desert heat.

If you're in the mood for a mood piece and you like your movies strong, mean and manly, this could be for you.

The reason it won't be a hit is that the pace is too slow, there's no one to root for (Pete is just too mad to be sympathetic) and the first hour is unnecessarily complicated.

Like screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's previous films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, it tells its story in non-linear fashion. Only when the film settles down in its second hour to tell the tale straight - as a road movie, but without the road - does it settle into a rhythm and achieve a rough poetry.

Three Burials (The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada)
Cert: 15