Django Unchained

Just know it's the sort of movie whose premiere gets postponed in the wake of school shootings and whose dialogue contains so many N-bombs that people have glumly gotten down to counting them. Sure, the word was common enough in the 1850s, but Quentin Tarantino is not exactly a paragon of historical verisimilitude. Here, again, the audacious ever-adolescent revisionist just wants us to know how, like, awesome our history would've been as one big bloody badass overlong Western-blaxploitation whatsit. Christoph Waltz plays a voluble and worldly bounty hunter who frees the eponymous hero, played by Jamie Foxx, to rescue his wife, played by Kerry Washington, from a brutal plantation lord played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Gangsta vengeance and tedium ensues. All told, good taste might have been more offensive. Waltz is wonderful, Foxx is deliberately less a character than a trope, and DiCaprio a bit of a bore, except in that he seems to enjoy acting again. Maybe the real revelation is Samuel L. Jackson in a career-capping turn as the slaveholder's elderly houseman, a sort of terrible and riveting Tarantino apotheosis, or at least an antithesis of the actor's role as Spike Lee's Mister Señor Love Daddy.