Django Unchained (2012)

All Critics (239) | Top Critics (44) | Fresh (213) | Rotten (28) | DVD (2)

A film bursting with pleasures great and small ...

January 8, 2013 Full Review

Tom Huddleston

Time Out

Top Critic

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

January 4, 2013 Full Review

Lisa Kennedy

Denver Post

Top Critic

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.

January 4, 2013 Full Review

Anthony Lane

New Yorker

Top Critic

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

January 2, 2013 Full Review

Glenn Kenny

MSN Movies

Top Critic

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.

December 27, 2012 Full Review

Joe Morgenstern

Wall Street Journal

Top Critic

Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers.

December 26, 2012 Full Review

Andrew O'Hehir

Salon.com

Top Critic

Tarantino slyly takes the dirty diaper that is slavery in America and rubs it in our face.

May 13, 2013 Full Review

Al Alexander

The Patriot Ledger

Django may be unchained, but his movie could have used some tighter shackles.

May 7, 2013 Full Review

Phil Villarreal

COEDMagazine.com

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is a brilliant mixture of over-the-top violence and clever writing, making for the most entertaining film of 2012.

April 23, 2013 Full Review

Jeremy Lebens

We Got This Covered

Django Unchained, arriving on Blu-ray and DVD with a meager collection of extras, is certainly a zesty night at the movies, but underneath the film's mock pretensions is a relatively conventional revenge thriller.

April 19, 2013 Full Review

Chuck Bowen

Slant Magazine

Slavery reimagined as a messy splatterfest where massa gets exactly what he deserves, and then some!

April 12, 2013 Full Review

Kam Williams

Sly Fox

A bloody masterpiece. Funny, Thrilling, cleverly structured.

April 8, 2013 Full Review

Marc Fennell

Triple J

It's a testament to Foxx and Washington's talent, presence, and proven rapport that they keep the central emotional hook strongly present as their underwritten roles are continually pushed to the sidelines by Tarantino's overwriting for others.

April 1, 2013 Full Review

Michael Dequina

TheMovieReport.com

Countless great scenes in the Tarantino universe

March 24, 2013 Full Review

Marty Mapes

Movie Habit

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

March 14, 2013 Full Review

Dave White

Movies.com

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

March 13, 2013 Full Review

Rob Gonsalves

eFilmCritic.com

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

March 3, 2013 Full Review

Tom Glasson

Concrete Playground

Different setting, same old Tarantino

February 28, 2013 Full Review

Robert Denerstein

Movie Habit

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.

February 28, 2013 Full Review

Greg Evans

Bloomberg News

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.

February 15, 2013 Full Review

Jim Schembri

3AW

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

February 4, 2013 Full Review

David 'Mad Dog' Bradley

Rip It Up

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

February 4, 2013 Full Review

Mark Pfeiffer

Reel Times: Reflections on Cinema

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

February 4, 2013 Full Review

David Nusair

Reel Film Reviews

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

February 3, 2013 Full Review

Dan Jardine

Cinemania

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.

February 3, 2013 Full Review

Linda Cook

Quad City Times (Davenport, IA)

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.

January 29, 2013 Full Review

Jason Best

Movie Talk

• 1. Django: You got yourself a deal mate!
  – Submitted by Vinay V (9 days ago)
• 1. d'Artagnan: I can't fight no more, Monsieur Candie.
  – Submitted by John D (19 days ago)
• 1. Django: Now, all you black folks, I suggest you get away from all these white folks! Not you, Stephen. You're right where you belong.
  – Submitted by John D (19 days ago)
• 1. Billy Crash: D-jango! You black son of a bitch!
  2. Django: The D is silent, hillbilly.
  – Submitted by John D (19 days ago)
• 1. Calvin Candie: Hey! You lay your palms flat on that tabletop! If you lift those palms off of that turtleshell tabletop, Mr. Pooch is gonna let loose through both ends of that sawed-off!
  2. Calvin Candie: There have been a lot of lies said around this dinner table here tonight, but that you can believe!
  – Submitted by John D (19 days ago)
• 1. Dicky Speck: You go to hell, dentist!
  – Submitted by Eric T (26 days ago)