End of Summer Blahs, Vol. II: 'Lawless,' 'The Possession' and 'For a Good Time, Call...'

Well, the good news is that this week's three new releases were - on the whole - better than last weekend's selections. The bad news is that they were all pretty average.

The film to which I was most looking forward was John Hillcoat's "Lawless," which details the bloody wars between moonshine bootleggers and a violent lawman (Guy Pearce) in the 1930s. The picture received middling reviews at Cannes, but I thought it was, perhaps, an example of an American genre film that gets lost amid all of that festival's higher profile films.

Alas. It's a pretty mediocre picture. Despite the fact that the movie has been wonderfully cast, its bevy of talented actors are given little to do other than murmur their way through an average script that is occasionally punctuated by outbursts of graphic violence. The film looks good, but it's an overall hit and miss viewing experience.

I was slightly surprised that "For a Good Time, Call..." was a little better than I'd expected. I found the film's overly vulgar trailer to be trying way too hard to be raunchy and outrageous. And while the film certainly contains those elements, which I thought to be the weakest moments in the picture, the film also contains a pretty touching portrayal of two women forming a friendship. At those moments, the film is at its best. On the whole, it's not a bad movie - it could have just down without all of the calculated outrageousness.

My final film of the week was "The Possession," which was significantly better than last weekend's supernatural outing - the dreadful "The Apparition." That being said, it's still pretty by-the-book. The film is at its best when following the divorce of Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick's characters and its effect on their children. But, of course, these scenes are surrounded by the obligatory low gruntings of the possessed, creepy eyeball rolling sequences and all manner of objects flying around rooms. To sum it up - meh.

Here are my reviews for Patch.

This coming weekend kicks off the fall movie season. I'll catch "The Words" as well as one of these pictures - "Bachelorette," "Branded" and "REC 3."