Django Unchained

2012 | 165 minutes | Rated R

Quentin Tarantino’s best movie since Jackie Brown is a sprawling, bloody, vulgar, unexpectedly humorous, action-packed tribute, not only to the filmmaker’s beloved spaghetti westerns and slavesploitation shockers such as Mandingo, but to — you’ll excuse the expression — the American sense of frontier justice. Jamie Foxx, in the title role as a newly freed slave, and Christoph Waltz, as a bounty hunter, take a detour into the depraved depths of the Old South, circa 1858, to tangle with a decadent plantation master (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his faithful (and evil) old retainer (Samuel L. Jackson) over a slave named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). The feathers fly. Tarantino’s dialogue is solid gold, especially when Waltz and Jackson say it. And the supporting cast is a who’s who of half-remembered heavies: Don Johnson, James Remar, Franco Nero (the original Django), Bruce Dern, Don Stroud, Michael Parks, et al. Functions best as a tongue-in-cheek corrective to The Birth of a Nation, with overtones of the ripe and raunchy Seventies junk-fu so many of us cannot live without. (160 min.) By Kelly Vance

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Django Unchained

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Official Site: unchainedmovie.com
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Producer: Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone, Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, Michael Shamberg, James W. Skotchdopole and Shannon McIntosh
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, Kerry Washington, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, David Steen, Dana Gourrier, Nichole Galicia, Laura Cayouette, Sammi Rotibi, Donahue Fontenot, Escalante Lundy, Miriam Glover, Don Johnson, Bruce Dern, Tom Wopat, Don Stroud, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, Doc Duhame, Jonah Hill and Lee Horsley