The Salvation is a western featuring Eric Cantona as a blackhat enforcer called The Corsican. Why haven't you bought a ticket already?

Kristian Levring’s old-fashioned revenge oater stars Mads Mikkelsen as a Danish settler along the 1870s frontier. When his wife and son are brutally murdered on a stagecoach, the former soldier takes swift action against the perpetrators, one of whom turns out to the brother of the district’s resident psychopath Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). The cowardly and terrified local townsfolk – including an opportunistic undertaker played by Jonathan Pryce – provide nothing by way of assistance. Shooting ensues.

It's a familiar set-up for anyone for anyone who has seen Stagecoach or Once Upon a Time in the West or High Noon or most any westerns before. Working from a script co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen, Levring has fashioned a horse opera that might easily sit with the autumnal westerns of Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher. If anything, The Salvation sits a little too easily within the oeuvre, offering little that we haven't seen before and often.

Still, any western is better than none. The painterly visuals are lovelier than we might have expected from the filmmaker behind The King is Dead, arguably the bleakest film to have emerged from the Dogme '95 imprint. The performances are excellent: Mikkelsen simmers convincingly under a mask of angst, Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a ball and Eva Green manages to tower, even though she's playing a mute.