"Nine years after Terrence Malick’s
Days of Heaven, on which Haskell Wexler accomplished some of his most celebrated work in tandem with Néstor Almendros, the cinematographer brought a similar feel for landscape shooting and natural light to the West Virginia valleys of John Sayles’s
Matewan. ... This startling scene, including others like the final standoff, offer punctuation in a film otherwise more rousing in its talk than its action, as Sayles charts the gradual awakening of a community’s conscience in the face of corporate oppressors.
Matewan opens as an influx of black and immigrant workers are shipped from Alabama to West Virginia by the Stone Mountain Mining Company in an attempt to weaponize racial resentments and, in turn, weaken the strike that’s happening up north. ..."
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