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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

God Save Texas: Hometown Prison

A still from Richard Linklater’s new film, God Save Texas: Hometown Prison.

Streaming on Max

Richard Linklater grew up in a company town. But in Huntsville, Texas, that meant something different. “Some towns have a steel mill; some have an Amazon plant. This was a prison town,” the filmmaker says. That complicated legacy is at the heart of Linklater’s latest movie, God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, part of a Max documentary series inspired by Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name. But Linklater’s visits with the people and places of Huntsville bear all the warmth and insights of his fiction films. (Linklater’s feature-length entry leads into two shorter studies, The Price of Oil and La Frontera, directed by Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa, respectively.) Hometown Prison confronts the damning injustice of executing prisoners who are likely innocent. In 2003, Linklater filmed protests around Delma Banks Jr., an inmate on death row despite coached testimony on the part of the prosecution and zero physical evidence, and this footage opens his new documentary, as if to suggest how little has changed. —Nicolas Rapold

Photo courtesy of HBO