Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

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Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Eva Green, Samuel L. Jackson

The pairing of Tim Burton and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - a story about kids with special abilities who are kept hidden away from society - is so obvious it almost feels like parody to actually see it. All that's missing are Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, replaced here by Eva Green and Samuel L. Jackson. While the film, adapted from Ransom Riggs' novel of the same name, is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be - full of whimsical misfits, grand spectacles of costume and production design, and, requisite for all big studio pictures, an ending that invites sequels - it's also the most that I've enjoyed a Burton film since probably Corpse Bride. It may not be a masterpiece, but it's a pretty decent entertainment.

Review: The Salvation (2014)

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Director: Kristian Levring
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

The frontier was the dividing line between civilization and lawlessness, a place where only the strong could survive, and where good men might have no choice but to become bad. Kristian Levring's western The Salvation might instead have been called "The Descent," centering as it does on a man trying to build a life in the middle of a dusty nowhere who loses everything and then goes on a mission of bloody vengeance. Even if genre tropes didn't exist, you might guess at his success simply by the fact that he's played by the formidable Mads Mikkelsen. The Salvation may not be a great western, sticking as it does to some pretty by the books plotting, but it's a decently entertaining one regardless of how many cliches it relies on and it fits in nicely with the kinds of B-movies that once made up the bulk of the American cinema landscape.

Netflix Recommends... 300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

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Director: Noam Murro
Starring: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro

A movie like 300: Rise of an Empire is kind of like a test for the audience. At about the 20 minute mark, Eva Green beheads a man, holds his head up, and kisses it on the lips as blood drips from the neck, and as a viewer you're either in the mood to embrace a moment like this (which is not isolated, but representative of what the film is doing generally) as being so hilariously ridiculous that it becomes sublime, or you're not. I genuinely cannot imagine that there's any sort of middle ground. Rise of an Empire is not a good movie - though, one could argue that it is a good sequel, insofar as it feels completely of a piece with 300 - but enough scenes in it are so supremely entertaining as to make it worth a watch. You'll know you're about to watch one of those scenes within a second of it starting - they're all the ones with Green in them.