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There is a prescient shot that opens "The Homesman," the spare frontier drama starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones. A flat stretch of Nebraska plain, a blanket of blue-gray sky, as if God himself had drawn a straight line between Heaven and Earth. It is haunting, that endless empty expanse. Jones, who also directs, keeps the focus there long enough to get you thinking. Veteran cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, with an Oscar nod for capturing the interplay between man and the environment so beautifully in "Brokeback Mountain," does the shooting. Between them, landscape becomes language. It speaks in anger — wind, snow and dust in cold gusts cutting against...