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The familiarity of western thriller ‘Old Henry’ is elevated by Tim Blake Nelson’s fine performance and filmmaker Potsy Ponciroli’s flair for suspense.

The writer-director Potsy Ponciroli sometimes gets too ripe in giving the dialogue a stylized twang, and the plot burdens itself with iconography it can’t support.

I have no idea if filmmaker Potsy Ponciroli wrote the coiled, small-scale western “Old Henry” for Nelson’s particular gifts with frontier authenticity — again, he’s the guy in the movie’s name, only this time a full-on lead — but it sure does seem like Ponciroli did.

They played potsy, humming “The Soldiers’ Chorus” from Faust which they called “Glory.”

She found him flattened out on a car track to make a miniature potsy.