For my money as good as pulp fiction: no spoilers as far as I know.

Rating: 8/10 (14 March 2014)

I can remember how delighted I was by Pulp Fiction, and Django Unchained is just as good. There is a really rewarding trajectory in the unpredictable yet enthralling story, and the nearly 3 hours weren't at all a strain: not for a moment was I bored. All the actors gave fine and involving performances, but Christopher Waltz stole every scene he was in, just as he did in Inglourious Basterds (which for my money, though still quite good, isn't in the same league): he is so very engaging, and thoroughly deserved his Oscar for best supporting actor, as did Tarantino for best script--I was beginning to think he'd lost his mojo, but he's back here on top form.
What can you say about Tarantino? What would cinema be like without what he's added to the canon? Indubitably, impoverished. It's like he's pulled back the curtains in a long-locked room to reveal a new way of looking at seemingly clichéd genres like crime fiction, and here, the Western. Never in a month of Sundays would I have imagined him tackling a Western, but here he does it with great panache and freshness. I'd love to see what a Tarantino science fiction flick would be like. After all, he has done the vampire thing with From Dusk Till Dawn, and it wouldn't be too far a stretch--and what the heck, I like science fiction; it's ripe for a bit of Tarantino-isation.
Besides Waltz, I thought Leonardo DiCaprio gave a lively performance as a villain, and whilst it might be easy to downplay Jamie Foxx's as a hero, one has to remember that he played his role just about right: rather laconically, which after all was how his part was written. I can't think of another actor who might have bettered it.
I've just watched it on DVD and will be giving it another viewing right after this review: I want to savour the nuances I might have missed, and to re-experience the Tarantino-esque fusion of realism with a kind of fantasy. Though on the face of it, he often deals with offensive material, because that fantasy element is always there, it's very difficult to actually be offended because one is transported to a mythic kind of realm where he's never trying to hit you over the head with earnestness: this is cinematic entertainment, and he never lets you forget it. You don't ever have to feel any kind of guilt because hey, this is a story, and a thunderingly good one, right?