Slow West (2015)

Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scot who has travelled to America to reunite with his true love Rose (Caren Pistorius). On his journey across to the west he encounters a gunslinger named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). They travel together, having a series of unusual encounters, and with secrets slowly revealed about their respective pasts.

Slow West is a wonderful oddity. It is a New Zealand-British co-production, but it is also a western set in 19th century America. It is also an unexpectedly idiosyncratic and bleak comedy, albeit one that can unexpectedly burst forth with frank and bloody moments of violence. At the same time it is soaked in a sort of mournful, melancholic fog. The film marks the feature film directorial debut of Scottish director John McLean. Quite how a Scottish fine arts graduate came to shoot a western in New Zealand is beyond me. However he managed it, I am glad that he did.

Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991)

He Ping, the Chinese director best known for his international arthouse hit Red Firecracker Green Firecracker, is also the director of an intriguing trilogy of 'Chinese westerns'. In these films He developed a combination of wuxia-style stories of heroic feudal warriors fighting evil in China's distant past with an aesthetic borrowed liberally from Sergio Leone and other Italian westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a curiously successful blend. I had previously reviewed Sun Valley (1996), the second film of the three, and many years ago I had the opportunity to see the third - Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003) - on the big screen. Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991) is the first of He's thematic trilogy, and it is a starkly told and effective sword-wielding western.

A teenager named Hao Ge (Gao Wei) travels across the western desert region of China to a small walled village known as Double Flag Town. He is there on the dying command of his father, a noted swordsman, to track down a crippled restaurant owner (Jiang Chang) and marry the man's daughter Hao Mei (Zhang Manna). When Hao Mei is almost raped, Hao Ge murders the assailant. When the assailant's brother arrives in town - a notorious and violent swordsman known as One Blow (Sun Haiying) - Hao Ge must stand against him or see the entire village slaughtered.

Unforgiven (1992)

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is a former outlaw and murderer. He quit drinking, married a woman, had two kids, and then lost his wife to smallpox. Now he's a pig farmer out in the middle of nowhere. When he hears of a bounty on two ranchers who mutilated a prostitute, he sets out along with his old partner (Morgan Freeman) for one last ride.

Unforgiven was a critical phenomenon back in 1992, receiving widespread and enthused acclaim and ultimately winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture. It's not difficult to see why. It's not that it's simply an outstanding film - and it truly is - it's also Clint Eastwood's final word on the western genre. He was arguably the last great western star Hollywood ever had, starring in numerous classics including A Fistful of Dollars, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Hang 'Em High, High Plains Drifter, Joe Kidd and Pale Rider. Unforgiven came seven years after Pale Rider, which had at the time seemed like it was Eastwood's final word on the genre.

Jubal (1956)

Mention westerns and a whole range of leading men come to mind: actors who pretty much established their on-screen reputations on the back of a horse with a six-shooter in their hand. Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Sterling Hayden... the list is extensive, because for a few decades there the western was one of the most commercially successful film genres there was. The actor who fascinates me the most from American westerns is Glenn Ford. Time doesn't seem to have remembered Ford. Movie-goers of my generation seem to remember him solely as Jonathan Kent in Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie. Movie-goers of more recent generations don't seem to know him at all.

That's a shame, because he's an outstanding lead in pretty much every western he made. Eastwood made an impact with his steely resolve and narrow eyes. Wayne found his audience as an everyperson with an easygoing, drawling kind of attitude. Ford seemed to excel at playing the walking wounded: cowboys who, either through life or misadventure, had come to the screen with emotional scars. He's the weary and reluctant hero, who doesn't want to pull his gun but knows he's going to have to. (The one key exception is 3:10 to Yuma, where he's deliberately cast against type.)

Pretty Deadly Vol 1: The Shrike (2014)

The western genre collides with folklore and even light horror in Pretty Deadly, a new comic book by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Emma Rios. It's an often-times thrilling read, and a has a lot within it to recommend. It's also maddeningly frustrating, sketchily illustrated and occasionally a little confusing. After reading this first volume The Shrike, which collects the first five monthly issues, I can't say my time was wasted. I can't say I'm in a rush to read a second volume.

A blind man goes on the run across the American west, a young girl in a vulture-feather cape named Sissy in tow. They're running from Death's daughter, a mysterious and deadly gunfighter with skull marks on her face and a penchant for violence. This is all told in retrospect by a rabbit and a butterfly.

The book's rich with magical realism and atmosphere, and certainly in this regard it excels. DeConnick has developed a very specific unsettling mood to the book, which does seem as if it could be rich with story potential. Sadly the story that's told feels too sparsely told, and in the end a little too rushed. It all seems like a pile of regrettable missed opportunities.

Django Unchained (2012)

I find Quentin Tarantino to be a remarkably useful tool when working out how developed somebody's sense of cinema might be. If somebody is ranting away at you about their opinions of contemporary cinema, he's one of the most valuable names to throw into the conversation. There are hipsters and poseurs, for example. who will swear blind that he's the greatest director in the world. These people all betray themselves as inexperienced and poorly exposed to film. The truth is Tarantino's films deal in pastiche and homage. His films are cut entirely from the concepts, mise-en-scene and production styles of earlier, more original filmmakers.

There are others who will swear to you that Tarantino writes and directs over-hyped, hipster-bait garbage. He has no ideas, he just rips off other filmmakers and claims their work as his own. This too is inaccurate and in this case rather snobbish, since Tarantino never claims he's come up with these ideas on his own and it devalues the immense talent involved in what he does write and direct. He is a wonderful magpie of a director, collecting a bit of music here, a camera angle there, and bits and bobs of dialogue, narrative, costume, set design and editing from a raft of 1960s and 1970s directors. and films. He is the definitive product of the home video generation: remixing and remaking an earlier generation of cinema into new and stimulating forms.

So to my mind the correct analysis of Tarantino is somewhere in the middle, No, he's not the most original voice in contemporary cinema, but then he isn't trying to be. He's not the guy who adds new ideas to the conversation of film; he's the guy who reframes and re-establishes what has already been said. Without him - and directors like him - there's a risk we might forget, and that's when we wind up with filmmakers like Zack Snyder and Michael Bay.

This is all an unnecessarily pompous lead-up to discuss Tarantino's most recent film, the western Django Unchained. It stars Jamie Foxx, Christophe Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio, and while it's not Tarantino's finest work (that remains Pulp Fiction, as far as I'm concerned) it is a wonderfully fun, violent and deliberately provocative work.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

In 1869, attorney John Reid is caught with his brother and a group of Texas Rangers in a fatal ambush. Left for dead, he is nursed back to health by Comanche Native American Tonto and persuaded to don a mask and seek revenge as the anonymous "Lone Ranger".

Disney's The Lone Ranger is a difficult film to review because it's not a great movie and it's not a bad one, yet certain aspects are brilliant and certain aspects are tedious in the extreme. One thing the film certainly represents is a textbook instruction manual for a Hollywood studio to lose money. It's impossible to look at the film and not think of how grossly unsuitable for mainstream success it is. The studio heads at Disney must have been asleep at the wheel. Or drunk. Possibly even on drugs.

The company must be happy to have such strong merchandising, animation and theme park revenues, because of course they've bet the farm on live-action cinema and lost, not once but twice in a row. 2012's John Carter was a costly commercial misfire, and The Lone Ranger is shaping up to be even worse. The combined budget and advertising costs of the two films must be somewhere in the region of $700 million dollars. Their combined gross revenue is about $500 million. All up, industry pundits estimate their combined total loss at about $300 million dollars. In effect, Walt Disney Pictures could have made the profit of a new Pirates of the Caribbean picture by sitting still and doing nothing.