Kristian Levring’s The Salvation is a true Western. If a check-list exists around essentials of the genre, he’s surely read the list and checked it twice. Revenge, grit, the most evil of bad guys, dirt, shotguns, horses, and a body count that calls into question how early America was able to stay populated at all. Starring Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt), Eva Green, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Levring’s film is a perfect throwback to the Westerns of old except that it can’t help but be swept up in its own modernity. The very act of using today’s bells and whistles to create such an homage piece invokes a sense of nostalgia but mostly distracts enough to cause the film to miss its mark. For all its action, bathetic conventions, and Mikkelsen’s perfectly edged face marked with old-world determination, The Salvation entertains but doesn’t inspire. It’s a reminder of all we love of Westerns, but lacking in the modern integrity we’ve come to expect.

Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish immigrant in late 19th century wild west America. He and his brother (Mikael Persbrandt) left their home country and their families to build fresh prospects and now, seven years later, Jon’s wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius) and son Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke) have traveled to join him. They aren’t reunited more than a few hours when the surly evil men of the wild west attempt to take advantage of Marie in the stage-coach. Jon scuffles with them but is thrown from the coach. By the time he catches up to them, he is too late, his family is dead. Jon manages to get the rifle of the men and kills them both. He makes plans to sell his land and leave, but he doesn’t realize he’s killed the brother of the baddest outlaw around, Delarue (Morgan).

Delarue marches into the town demanding penance for the murder of his brother. The Sheriff/town preacher Mallick (Douglas Henshall) isn’t able to meet Delarue’s demand that the killer be found in a matter of hours, so he takes his price, several of the innocent townspeople, including an elderly grandmother. It’s a brutal introduction to the film’s villain, but certainly leaves no doubt that Delarue is a painstakingly one-dimensional evil-driven mad man. Mallick eventually tracks Jon down, deciding that handing him over to Delarue will buy him some time until government reinforcements can help him out. Jon is strung up and left to die, his brother imprisoned. And then the action starts.

Eva Green is Madelaine, a mute whose tongue was cut out when she was captured by Native Americans. Delarue’s brother saved her and married her, no doubt without asking for her input. Delarue gladly takes his brother’s place as her caretaker and lover, but Madelaine plots her escape, unsuccessfully. Green is excellent in the role, her naturally icy stare making up for her utter lack of dialogue. Mikkelsen and Persbrandt kick ass, taking down Delarue’s henchman one by one as he enacts his revenge.

Levring’s close following of the laws of Westerns entertain at first, making it hard not to smile at their obviousness. Unfortunately, they are never able to make up for the more glaring holes in The Salvation. While Westerns are known for their lack of dialogue, Levring seems to have deliberately tried to create cookie-cutter characters, the most obvious of these being Jon and Delarue, the main characters. Jon has clear motivation (the murder of his family) but almost no depth otherwise. We know he was a soldier, but nothing of his personal conviction. But hey, he looks like a badass, and badasses do badass things. Delarue on the other hand might as well be a cartoon character from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sure, he understands the significance of the “sticky oil” bursting out of the ground in the area, secretly buying up all the land to make a profit, but mostly he’s just a blood-driven fiend, shooting people rather than inciting any real fear or authority over them.

It’s easy to be swept away watching Jens Schlosser’s visuals, it’s a beautiful film; the production design executed to perfection by Jørgen Munk, and the era captured intricately by Diana Cilliers’ costumes. And although revenge is almost always sweet, The Salvation is so clearly using its Western facade to cover what is actually a brainless, bloody, action film that it leaves a more hollow feeling after its credits roll. Levring has talent and all the trappings, but any cowboy could tell him it isn’t the size of your gun, it’s how you use it.

What’s in store for the fantastical world of Tim Burton?

Aside from the incredible confirmation that he will be directing Beetlejuice 2 which is rumored to be in the works for 2016 and includes a screenplay by original screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (and for which Michael Keaton has expressed deep enthusiasm for reprising his role as the title character) he is in post-production right now for Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass, that is also set for 2016.

Burton has also been slowly but surely adding to the cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Based on the 2011 YA novel of the same name, the freshman work of author Ransom Riggs, it follows the story of tragedy-stricken 16-year-old Jacob, who Asa Butterfield has been cast to play. He discerns that there are clues in his grandfather’s old photographs—which, in the book, are actual professional photographs picked from archives. He is led to a former home for special children that is no longer occupied… or is it? And said former occupants might have a lot more to them than meets the eye. The book was a New York Times Bestseller and was #1 on the list for children’s chapter books for 45 weeks.

Along with Butterfield, the newly announced cast includes Burton favorite Eva Green as Miss Peregrine and the great Samuel L. Jackson as Barron.

It seems the sort of work written especially for the unusual and strange talents of Tim Burton. According to IMDB, the film is slated for an early 2016 release as well. Is there really a possibility for three movies from Tim Burton in one year? Our hearts can barely sustain it. What can we say? It sounds like it is going to be a mystical Burtonesque 2016! All we have to say is, Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!!

While watching Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard I had the silly thought that the experience seemed similar to what it might be like to watch someone put on a two-hour theatrical using a doll house and brightly costumed dolls. In the same way a child playing with dolls is apt to exaggerate movements and voices to animate soulless toys, so do the performances and tableau of the film feel embellished and dream-like.

Shailene Woodley plays Kat Connor, a teenager deep in the throes of sexual awakening and exploration. Her mother Eve (Eva Green) disappears when Kat is 17, failing to return from the grocery store one day. Through flashback, Eve’s emotional decline is evident in her interaction with her husband Brock (Christopher Meloni) and her seething disdain for his every loving sentence, action, and breath. Leading up to her disappearance, Eve’s interactions with Kat — especially when her boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) is present — get more and more vindictive. Strutting about in mini skirts and waking Kat in the night to slut shame her only scratch the surface of her paranoia and desperation in her housewife life.

After Eve disappears, Kat and Brock find their way through life. Kat goes to therapy to discuss her feelings and, more often, lack of feelings about her mother’s displaced status. She goes to college. She dates new boys. She takes up smoking.  It isn’t until she visits home during a school break, checking in with her old friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato) and meeting her dad’s new girlfriend, that a conversation with now ex, Phil, causes her to question everything she thought she understood around her mother’s disappearance. Revelations that casts every relationship she has into question.

To think of White Bird in a Blizzard as a mystery would be mostly inaccurate. Mystery implies suspicion, and until very late in the film, there is none of that. Even the temptation to classify it as a character study feels wrong, as everyone is clearly filtered through Kat’s immature and narrow-sighted purview. In her eyes her mother is a drama queen, her father is a coward, Phil is a disposable sex toy, and Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane) isn’t important for his work on her mother’s case, but instead as an example of the raw manly sexual ideal Kat’s decided is most attractive. And all of this would work just fine if the film’s ending didn’t throw real emotional revelations into the mix and expect us to accept them despite having spent all our time in a dream world until then.

As for performances, Eva Green and Christopher Meloni play their doll house roles with amazing style and energy. At first almost Stepford wife scary, Eve is robotic with her mannerisms and sharp in her candor. It starts out as off-putting and by the end is absolutely entrancing. Similarly as Kat’s idea of a wimp, Brock literally slumps his shoulders, hands hanging aloof at his sides, his every sentence exuding the cluelessness of a man trying to make sense of the marriage that’s crumbling in front of him and a daughter he holds little connection to. It’s almost hard to watch. Both deserve accolade, but Woodley’s Kat shows little signs of maturation despite the passage of time or the intensity of the truths she discovers by the end of the film, though I will hand it to her, she has teenage rebellion down pat.

Her lack of development may be due in part to what is clearly the film’s biggest failing, and that is the rushed ending. It’s possible the novel the film is based on spent a similarly short amount of time on the plot’s twists, but certainly its slower format in general must have given its readers more chance to process the information they are given. In the film, the editing fails by focusing on the wrong things, not allowing us enough growth with Kat to feel the impact of her self-revelations. It’s hard not to want her to care more about her life, though to give the film due credit, it well reflects the selfish preoccupation teenagers have in prioritizing their lives according to their daily dramas.

Another badge Gregg Araki deserves is in the perfectly curated music of the film and a great score from Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie. Full of great ’80s fare it’s worth staying through the end credits to create a playlist from the offerings, including Cocteau Twins, The Psychedelic Furs, and New Order. The art direction is equally enthralling — a well-crafted picture of the ’80s with a touch of ’50s sensibility.

Many beautiful elements and strong performances make White Bird in a Blizzard a stimulating watch, but its utter lack of real emotion do great injustice to the cruelty of loss and the very real emotions flooding through the average teenager at any given second. Kat’s only passion seems to be sexual, giving her an impractical flatness on which the entire film falls. Araki, known for reveling in unpleasant material in earlier films such as Mysterious Skin, manages to direct all discomfort into watching each characters’ overblown identity play out on-screen, while rushing past the hairy exposition without allowing it some influence. It’s just too hard to care for the story endings of dolls.

Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb is a quiet, abstract, and eerie science fiction film about a woman who has a hard time of letting go. There is no doubt that it has drawn some controversy due to incest playing a big role in the film. With a taboo subject, slow moving and depressing feel, it is easy to see how Womb would be difficult for the average viewer to sit through, however, I found no such difficulties.

Womb begins with a voice over, “Just because you went away, it does not mean you are not here anymore. Perhaps I all ever needed was this gift. The one you gave to me at the end.” The last line is important as this opening scene is really the end. It is hard to call it foreshowing because if you pay attention it practically gives the ending away.

A friendship begins when two young children meet on a rainy beach underneath a dock. Soon Rebecca and Thomas share much of their time with one another which normally consists of going on beach adventures together. But that does not last for long as Rebecca informs Thomas that she will be moving away with her mother to Tokyo to live in an apartment on the 72nd floor.

The film then jumps ahead 12 years later when Rebecca (Eva Green) is now an adult. We see her take the same ferry back into the town she left on as a child. Rebecca now lives in the same house she grew up in. Eager to see Thomas she finds out that he does not live too far away from where he grew up at. When the two do finally meet again as adults Thomas (Matt Smith) remembers the exact floor number of the apartment she moved away to so long ago.

Not long after the two reunite Thomas tragically dies in a car accident. This is where Womb takes an interesting turn. While mourning his loss she comes up with the bizarre idea of giving birth to his clone so that she can effectively bring him back into the world again. Perhaps cloning him is Rebecca’s way of coping with the idea of Thomas’s death being her fault. At least that would be the most logical answer but that is when the film takes another turn, a controversial one at that.

Never moving faster than it needed to, sometimes even a bit too slow, the film showed us subtle hints of something deeply troubling Rebecca. There is intense passion she has for her son/lover that goes back and forth between being a mother and being attracted to her deceased lover.

The director of photography, Peter Szatmari, repeatedly shows long empty shots of an overcast beach, resulting in beautiful cinematography that was carefully done. It accurately portrays the loneliness and isolation that is found in Rebecca.

In a lot of ways Eva Green’s character in this film is similar to the one she played in the Jordan Scott’s marvelous film Cracks. Both of the characters had to deal with unconventional sexual desires. Green’s performance here is solid, on the outside there is not a lot going on but it is evident that on the inside she is torn.

Because Womb moves at a snail’s pace, some audiences may find it difficult to hold their interest in it. Others may find it hard to get over the underlying theme of incest. If you can get past those two big hurdles then you will see the film does have something to offer aside from the amazing cinematography. The film shows how powerful nostalgia can be and how difficult it can be to let go.

A feature debut from Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley) who wrote and directed Cracks – a story that starts off innocent but eventually unravels to show a dark psychological side. Some say it’s a girl version of Lord of the Flies, which I agree that there are a lot of similarities between the two, but the underlying theme in this is lust and desire.

Cracks is set in the year 1934 at St. Mathilda’s School in Stanley Island, England. The all-girls boarding school is oppressive and strict which is probably why most of the students look up to the diving instructor Miss G (Eva Green), because she is the opposite. Miss G is a passionate and rule-breaking teacher that is adored by all the students for her lack of traditionalism, but none more than Di (Juno Temple).

Miss G is also a very confident woman and knows the girls look up to her for advice, which she is willing to give. She says that “the most important thing in life is desire” – “nothing is impossible, all you need is to desire it”. You get the sense that Di has desire for Miss G.

The girls receive news that a new girl from Spain will be joining their class. Fiamma (María Valverde), the newcomer, is not exactly welcomed with open arms. This is not surprising considering the typical school atmosphere filled with cliques. Since Di acts as the captain of the group, she sets her straight on the rules, even when Fiamma questions some of the strict ones.

Blatantly obvious is Di’s dislike for Fiamma from the very start and it does not end there. Miss G has all the girls practice high diving into the lake. Di is deemed to have set the bar for the group until Fiamma dives that is. Even though it is winter in Spain and new to the group, her dive is the best out of all of them. Further impressing Miss G and subsequently creating more hostility from Di.

Even more than being impressed with Fiamma, Miss G seems to be very much intrigued by her. She is jealous that Fiamma has been all over the world, citing that traveling is one of her favorite things to do. Perhaps expanding upon her intrigue she goes through Fiamma’s records only to find out that she has been in trouble because of her behavior and is of great concern. Needless to say, Miss G is a little taken-aback, not to mention us as the viewer.

Although Miss G seems startled about learning that about her student, she seems even more attracted to Fiamma, in more than one way. She approaches her and awkwardly and in a bizarre fashion states the two of them could be best friends but with a slight hint of implying something more. Miss G even goes out of her way to buy her special lunches from town just for her and not the other students, clearly favoring Fiamma. It is hard now not to start questioning if Miss G or Fiamma is the one that is slightly off.

The ending literally had me saying wow. I do not like giving away spoilers to films like this because it is what makes Cracks so enjoyable. Therefore, it is hard not to give away the specifics but the ending for me was amazing and haunting. Being as generic as I can, we are led to believe a letter at the end was written by one character but shows it was really a different one, my theory is perhaps they were both the same character. It probably is not the case but that’s how I interpreted it and thought it was a genius last twist.

The cinematography is outstanding. In shots outside, especially the lake, are crisp and beautiful. Even at night, the lake is wonderfully lit and everything is visible. The film is shot with lower saturation, so the colors are muted a little more which gives it sort of a vintage feel that is spot on.

Hard to believe is the fact that Cracks is Jordan Scott’s first feature as a director, as it is remarkably well shot. Cracks had sort of a classical or Shakespearean type of story with lust, jealously, sexuality, betrayal and tragedy. The story may be too lackluster for some but the way it slowly cracks, pun intended, from an ordinary and innocent one to a psychological and disturbing one was great.