Midnight movies can be a mixed bag at the Cannes Film Festival — some are curios that go on to become genuine cult items, some simply sneak back to the place from whence they came and are never heard from again. The star factor alone of “The Salvation,” selected for this year's festival, suggests it won't entirely disappear on us, but it does look to be a somewhat unusual hybrid: a 19th-century Old West revenge yarn with a distinct European slant, not least in the casting of Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green and, uh, Eric Cantona.
The Danish-British-South African production was directed by Kristian Levring — whose 2008 thriller “Fear Me Not” travelled the festival circuit a bit before going direct to DVD in the US — and co-written by regular Susanne Bier collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen. Mikkelsen looks to be on typically tough form as Danish settler drawn into a blood feud when his family is murdered; familiar stuff, but I can't work out from the trailer if the film is aiming for kitsch genre pastiche or not. Looks quite fun either way.