Frontera

Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.

A well-cast, well-made, well-acted drama that you will probably forget about soon after you’ve seen it.

By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.

The modern, gritty Western Frontera takes a lot of the clichés and delicately upends them to tell a tale about undocumented immigrants.

Ed Harris is a performer made for Westerns, and he’s perfectly utilized in debuting director Michael Berry’s middling if still very watchable modern-day oater as Roy.

Before the hokey third act, there’s much to like about Michael Berry’s border-crossing drama Frontera.

The complexities of those people are diluted in a movie that’s not quite a functional ensemble but not intimate enough to qualify as a character study.

A solid crime drama that strangely is not getting a wider release. A great cast really lifts this movie up. It also has some great semi-unknown actors such as Marilyn Rising that really bring heart into the story. It is a great movie that hopefully people will notice.

Frontera starts strong, good acting, characters and a compelling story. But somehow it deflated after the first 45 minutes or so. Possibly because, while it began with some surprises, it eventually became predictable and no one person or situation had enough juice to propel the viewer along. At least not for me. I wish I could give it a better rating, but in the end I barely finished watching it and ended up doing other stuff while it played - not a good sign.