88% Django Unchained

All Critics (234) | Top Critics (43) | Fresh (207) | Rotten (27)

A film bursting with pleasures great and small ...

Django Unchained is Tarantino's most complete movie yet. It is also his most vital. His storytelling talents match the heft of the tale.

Django Unchained has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.

Genre-movie-mad writer-director Quentin Tarantino's foray into Western World is a pretty grave disappointment.

Wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery's singular horrors.

Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers.

Countless great scenes in the Tarantino universe

It's exactly what you expect from Tarantino, so if this movie finds itself challenged in any way, it's in being expected.

...the time always flies, and Tarantino gives us a lot of movie for our money.

Tarantino's take on slavery is wildly creative, funny and frightening, true to form yet never predictable.

Different setting, same old Tarantino

Slavery is to "Django" what the Holocaust was to Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" -- a colossal wrong to be righted by a film geek's best weapons: artistry, imagination and wicked humor.

Tarantino is, in essence, a classicist who invests the bulk of his drama and tension in lengthy dialogue exchanges that are infinitely more compelling that his elongated sequences of cathartic violence.

Still wonderfully witty and violent sequences that only Tarantino could manage or dare.

This bloody, hilarious, shocking, and righteously angry film is the kind of great art and great trash [Tarantino] aspires to make.

...compulsively watchable for the majority of its (admittedly overlong) running time...

I had a good enough time to wish that it had been better.

Part-blaxploitation film, part-spaghetti Western and all-Tarantino, 'Django Unchained' comes charging at its audiences with guns a-blazin'. It's not quite up to par with 'Reservoir Dogs' or 'Pulp Fiction,' but it's still Tarantino - enough said.

Overlong, overblown and overly self-indulgent. But excess is what Tarantino does. And just as he won't put one word in his characters' mouths when he can have them utter 10; he won't dispatch a bad guy with one bullet when he can discharge a dozen.

It would seem that this film's irreverence isn't a case of didn't-try-can't-fail dismissiveness, but rather something more innocuous: it's simply the world interpreted through Tarantino's boisterous perspective.

The funniest western since Blazing Saddles, the bloodiest since The Wild Bunch and the most visually stylish since The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

Guilty of almost every indulgence [Tarantino] has ever been accused of...but it's hard to hold it against him, when the results are this bloody good

Ultimately enjoyable, if a little underwhelming, if nothing else we can be grateful to Django Unchained for allowing the phrase "that's the worst thing since Quentin Tarantino's Australian accent".

Impolitic though it might be to suggest it, there's something extremely satisfying about the violence here-though, for my money, it resides less in seeing these racist thugs get their comeuppance, than in the director's staging of it.

it's fitting that one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time is using the western and blaxploitation genres to connect the enduring blemish on the American psyche - only to set loose a bad motherf*cker to set it right.

Thrilling, stylish, funny, brutal, superbly-acted, sharply written and wonderfully offensive.

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/django_unchained_2012/

ravi leigh espn greg oden st patricks day st. bonaventure ira glass