Borders and alienation are at the heart of Tommy Lee Jones’s new (and first) film, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, even as the way in which profound friendship can cut across borders and mend even the seemingly unmendable wounds of life—along with a healthy dose of dark humor—lifts the film out of the realm of cynicism to somewhere hopeful.

This is a great film by any measure. Guillermo Arriaga’s (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) carefully crafted script deliberately unravels the fate of Melquiades (Julio Cedillo), the mystery being not so much what happened but how do we come to this place, where we have to look at each other across a line, and what do we see there? Jones paces the film out so that time stretches to encompass understanding—scenes grow longer as mystery fades into comprehension (though, as in life, not all mysteries are solved).

Shot in Jones’s backyard along the Texas-Mexico border, The Three Burials … captures the stark and relentless beauty of a region that, in some ways, is still frontier-land, emotionally, as well as physically. Barry Pepper is excellent as the unthinking outsider transformed by the harsh tutelage of Tommy Lee Jones’s Pete, Melquiades’s loyal friend. Melissa Leo and January Jones are latter-day frontierswomen who present sexual availability but also, in the end, a willingness to set their own terms. If everyone else weren’t so good, Levon Helm would steal the film in his brief appearance as its blind oracle (Homer and Peckinpah both make their presence felt).

At once a throwback to the films of Peckinpah, Leone (the score is by Marco Beltrami, a student of Jerry Goldsmith and, according to Jones, Ennio Morricone), and Kurosawa, and an original vision, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a masterful achievement, thematically rich and vastly entertaining.