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Dr. Frank Swietek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dallas, where he is regarded as a particularly tough grader. He has been the film critic of the University News since 1988, and has discussed movies on air at KRLD-AM (Dallas) and KOMO-AM (Seattle). He is also the Founding President of the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics' Association, a group of print and broadcast journalists covering film in the Metroplex area, and was a charter member of the Society of Texas Film Critics. Dr. Swietek is a member of the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS). He was instrumental in the creation of the Lone Star Awards, which, through the efforts of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Film Commission, give recognition annually to the best feature films and television programs produced in Texas.

Producers: Peter Dinklage, David Ginsberg, Caddy Vanasirikul, Brian O’Shea, Elliott Lester, Shannon Gaulding, Chad Oakes, Michael Frislev, Andre L III and Gianni Nunnari Director: Elliott Lester Screenplay: Chris Kelley Cast: Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Esme Creed-Miles, Levon Hawke, Leslie Grace, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Macon Blair, Arliss Howard, James Hetfield, Ned Dennehy, David Midthunder, Andrew Schulz, Ryan Robbins, Guy Sprung, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: B

The moodiness is so thick you could cut it with a knife in Elliott Lester’s adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s 2013 novel. Scripted by newcomer Chris Kelley, “The Thicket” is set at the cusp of the twentieth century, in a desolate, wintry American West where technology is just starting to intrude—a motorcycle appears in the opening scene—and the old way of life is crumbling.

Yet the story, which basically comes down to the pursuit of a gang of cutthroat outlaws by a bounty hunter and the man who’s hired him, is a traditional one. But it comes with some unexpected twists. The bounty hunter, Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage), is a dwarf. The gang leader, Cut Throat Bill, is a woman (Juliette Lewis). And they’re joined by a sense of resentment against the world as objects of ridicule—Jones for his size, Bill for her heavily scarred face, the result of a brutal childhood narrated late in the film by a preacher (Ned Dennehy) whose church she’s burned down.

Jones is hired by callow young Jack Parker to track down Bill, who’s abducted his sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) after killing their grandfather Caleb (Guy Sprung) in an altercation over a ferry boat ride. (The siblings had just lost both their parents to smallpox.) Jones and his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are themselves being pursued by brothers Simon and Malachi Deasy (James Hetfield and Macon Blair); they’ve been deputized by Bailey Mayfield (Ryan Roberts), a town grandee who’d been humiliated by Jones after Mayfield had not only tried to shortchange him on a grave-digging job but then disparaged him as a man.

Jones reluctantly accepts Jack’s offer after being promised a plot of land the Parkers are scheduled to inherit, and so the three men set out in pursuit of Bill and her remaining gang members (Arliss Howard, David Midthunder, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant), who are headed for the Thicket, a heavily-forested region that the snows will cut off from the rest of the world until the spring thaw. The unofficial posse will gradually get two new members: Jimmy Sue (Leslie Grace), a prostitute Jack rescues from her cruel boss (Andrew Schultz), and Malachi Deasy, after Bill has killed his brother. All will be settled at a cabin in the Thicket where the bodies pile up.

Dinklage and Lewis are both in fine form, he putting his gruff act to excellent use as he mans a rifle with a telescopic attachment that he inherited from Annie Oakley, with whom he once worked the circuit, and she playing the snarling, pitiless villain to perfection, cutting down one hapless victim after another. (She’s also the motorcyclist in that initial scene, stopping long enough to interrupt a funeral and order the casket opened so that she can steal the corpse’s warm coat, as well as a horse.) The rest are all fine, but even the most flamboyant of them pale in contrast to the stars, who, thankfully, share one scene at a table in a saloon, commiserating over their mistreatment by the world.

The film benefits from the authentically frigid Canadian locations, beautifully caught by cinematographer Guillermo Garza in painterly widescreen images. The production design (Justin Ludwig), art direction (Edward Smith Taylor), set decoration (Tara Bartlette) and costumes (Ann Maskrey) all contribute to a compelling sense of place and time. Lester’s approach is very deliberate, with even the action sequences taking their time to unfold, and Jean-Christophe Bouzy’s editing contributes to the unhurried, meditative feel. So does Ray Suen’s understatedly mournful score, which gives way in the bittersweet coda to a Schubert piano piece. That final sequence is a callback to the observation from Emily Dickinson that opens the film about home—something that most of the characters in “The Thicket,” even those most damaged, are striving to find for themselves.

This was obviously a passion project for Dinklage, who also serves as one of the producers, and although it’s not without some flaws of pacing, he’s done it proud. This handsomely mounted, slow-burning Western has a plot that’s essentially a genre commonplace, but it adds enough unusual elements to give it real distinction.

Producers: Ariel Vromen, Andreas Rommel, Maurice Fadida, Sascha Penn and Adam Kolbrenner Director: Ariel Vromen Screenplay: Sascha Penn and Ariel Vromen Cast: Tyrese Gibson, Ray Liotta, Scott Eastwood, Clé Bennett, Dylan Arnold, Christopher A’mmanuel, Michael Beasley, Ori Pfeffer, Tosin Morohunfola and Oleg Taktarov Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

There’s an identity crisis at the heart of Ariel Vromen’s “1992.” One part of the film deals with serious issues of racism and family dysfunction. The other is an almost comically overheated robbery melodrama. The combination makes for a clumsy brew.

The story is set in Los Angeles toward the close of April, 1992, as a jury is deliberating the fate of the police officers accused of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King the previous year. On the one hand we’re introduced to Mercer Bey (Tyrese Gibson), an ex-con once prominent in a local gang and now determined to go straight; he has a job as a custodian at factory where catalytic converters are manufactured, thanks to his friend Joseph (Michael Beasley), the head of security there. Mercer also has custody of his teenaged son Antoine (Christopher A’mmanuel) who lived with his mother and grandmother until both died recently in a car crash. The boy bristles at having to follow Mercer’s strict rules.

Then there are the Bigbys. Patriarch Lowell (Ray Liotta) is a hardened criminal specializing in small-time robberies. His older son Riggin (Scott Eastwood) has been scoping out the converter shop since the devices contain precious metals like platinum. He and his younger brother Dennis (Dylan Arnold) suggest to Lowell that they rob the place, but he initially turns down the idea, saying that the job is too big and the security too formidable. His dismissive attitude toward the boys is obvious.

Then on April 29 the verdict acquitting the cops is announced, and the city explodes. Mercer reacts by going out into the riot-torn streets and finding Antoine before he gets hurt; he’s made arrangements with Joseph to hole up in the factory, whose workers have been sent home for their safety. The drive there is not uneventful, however: they’re stopped by cops, whose treatment of them infuriates the boy and tests even Mercer’s stoicism. But they eventually reach the plant.

By that time, however, the Bigby gang is there. Lowell has decided that the riots provide a perfect cover for a heist, and he, Riggin, Dennis and their crew have made their way there, intending an easy score. Unfortunately they encounter Joseph and kill him. And they find that extracting the platinum ingots from the safe in which they’re kept will be a time-consuming process. When Mercer and Antoine arrive, they find Joseph dead, and try to evade being noticed. It doesn’t work, of course; as the night goes on, one member of the gang lies seriously injured by a wayward fork lift, Antoine is in the hands of Lowell, and Riggin has been captured by Mercer. A standoff follows, culminating in a car chase.

This whole last act is staged adequately enough, but the details of the robbery aren’t especially exciting, and Mercer’s means of saving his son and extricating them both from danger not terribly clever. The scenario does demonstrate the dramatic difference in the attitudes of the two fathers, the one intensely protective and the other relatively uncaring—Lowell seems more interested in ensuring that he get the loot than in seeing to his sons’ survival. But that’s presented in relatively simplistic terms.

And the background of social strife “1992” seems so concerned with portraying early on has pretty much disappeared. The riots actually went on for days and the damage was extensive, but as far as the movie is concerned, once Mercer and Antoine are safe, we can stop caring. It makes the setting little more than a convenient way of explaining why the heist happens as it does, in an empty factory in which both sides have ample time to strategize as the world outside goes to hell in a way we really don’t see. As such the timing comes across as an exploitative plot device rather than a window into a horrendous historical event, though to be fair a sequence is included to italicize the rioters’ targeting of Korean businesses.

Otherwise the picture wears its low-budget, gritty look proudly, with John D. Kretschmer’s production design nondescript and Frank G. DeMarco’s camerawork keeping most everything in darkness to hide the location limitations. Editor Danny Rafic integrates archival footage into the street recreations fairly effectively, but the heist sequences sometimes get sluggish and muddled, while Gilad Benamram’s music is bland.

The cast, though, almost saves things. Gibson makes a solid laconic hero, and while Liotta, in what was probably his final role, can hardly be accused of subtlety, he sells Lowell’s mania in his patented fashion. Eastwood is just okay, but A’mmanuel catches both Antoine’s anger and, in the latter stages, his terror effectively. The rest of the actors are adequate at best, though Beasley is a nicely avuncular presence.

Vromen, who coupled with Michael Shannon to pretty good effect in 2012’s “The Iceman” but stumbled badly in the 2016 Ryan Reynolds-Kevin Costner clunker “Criminal,” is trying to have it both ways here, saying something significant about blacks and whites and fathers and sons while going through the paces of a standard-issue heist thriller. But the two elements don’t gel, and “1992” proves a film whose realization doesn’t measure up to its ambition.