7 films worth seeking out in the next 7 days.

Saturday/Sunday 24th BBC4 @00.20

Bicycle Thieves. A man's bicycle is stolen and he needs to get it back. A simplistic synopsis for a heartbreaking story of poverty & honour in World War 2 Italy. Once voted the best film ever made and its certainly a contender. The type of movie that when you bring it up in conversation you instantly look like a cineaste.

Sunday 25th RTE2 @21.00

Up In The Air. George  Clooney & Vera Farmiga are top notch in this comedy/drama about two people who make a connection while living very lonely lives due to work. Cracking supporting cast in this too.

Monday 26th TG4 @21.30

Contagion. A star studded, intelligent and terrifyingly realistic depiction of what happens during and after a deadly pandemic decimates the human population. This one will make you hesitate the next time you reach for the antibiotics to cure your cold.

Tuesday/Wednesday 27th Film 4 @0.55

Synecdoche, New York. In a nutshell, a theatre director becomes obsessed with his work. Philip Seymour Hoffman is immense in this. It won't be for everyone but its a very rewarding watch and even better on the second viewing. Touching, humane and ambitious and with a superb supporting cast.

Wednesday 28th ITV4 @23.15

Bullitt. Steve McQueen. That car. That car chase. That music. A witness is killed. A cop sets out to take down the killer. A simple story done with style and verve. You'll recognise parts of this classic thriller even if you've never seen it.

Thursday 29nd 3E @22.00

Bullet To The Head. Sylvester Stallone plays an aging hitman out for revenge in New Orleans. Not well received by critics but very enjoyable stuff. Perfect film to record for some day when you are in a vile mood and want to see numerous baddies get bloodily gunned down.

Friday 30th Film4 @11.00

Forty Guns. Barbara Stanwyck as a tough as nails rancher facing off against the law. For the time (1957) this was an unusual but very good little western. Certainly different from the films of the time, it has a pretty straight forward story line but it full of surreal and odd 
touches. Stanwyck is great plus it looks fantastic.

7 films worth seeking out in the next 7 days. Couple of bona fide classics included this week.

Saturday 17th  BBC 2 @23.25

A Serious Man. A Jewish man's life goes into a downward spiral in 1960's Minnesota in this pretty black comedy. Far more interesting than it sounds. Full of typical Coen Brothers quirkiness. You mightn't enjoy this but you'll be glad you watched it.

Sunday 18th Syfy @21.00 

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. A heartbroken man undergoes a procedure to remove his memories of his ex-girlfriend. That's a very simple explanation for this bizarre and beautiful little film. Kate Winslet is good as always but Jim Carrey is superb, a career best ( so far) performance in a film you wont want removed from your head.

Monday 19th TG4 @21.30

Sweeney Todd. Tim Burton's beautiful looking and spectacularly bloody musical version of the Victorian tale of murder and cannibalism and haircuts. Depp is good but the star if this is imo, Helena Bonham Carter. She steals the show. Not for the faint of heart or the squeamish, this is the polar opposite to musicals like The Sound Of Music.

Tuesday 20th Film 4 @11am

High Noon. 85 minutes of pure tension as an about to be married sheriff has his past come back to haunt him and has his friends and colleagues let him down when he needs them most. Gary Cooper got an Oscar for his role in this classic western and thoroughly deserved it.

Wednesday 21st ITV 4 @22.00

Jaws. Cinematic perfection. Man vs nature. If you've seen it you know its a masterpiece, if not i'm jealous because you are in for a massive treat. Brilliant characters, some great tension & scares and some lovely little moments of comedy to relive the suspense.

Thursday 22nd Film 4 @14.40 

For Whom The Bell Tolls. A wartime romance, once again starring Gary Cooper as an American soldier fighting in the Spanish civil war who falls in love with Ingrid Bergman, a guerrilla fighter with a horrific past. Its a long film, nearly 3 hrs but the acting, both from the leads and the super supporting cast, the scenery and the score make sure the time flies by.

Friday 23rd RTE 2 @22.00

Heat. A crime masterpiece. Pacino & De Niro plus a glorious supporting cast. Cops and robbers on an epic scale. Couldn't get with this at all when i saw it first but i love it now. Everything about this film is quality. Best bank robbery scene ever too. IMHO.

A Date For Mad Mary. A lovely little Irish gem.

Mary has no place in the world. She's just out of jail and her friends are leaving her behind, turning into adults and getting married and all she wants to do is dance and have a few laughs. The wild teen has grown into a wild woman and her friends are ashamed of her. Now she has 3 weeks to find a date to her best friend's wedding and is out to prove she can gets herself one to spite her friends who have wrote her off as undateable.

From the tone of the trailers and what i'd heard i was expecting a full on comedy but this was much better than that. Yes, there's a lot of laughs but there's also a bucket-load of heart. Sad in places, poignant in others and even room for a spot of tenderness. Its a film that's not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.

Seana Kerslake is fantastic in the title role. Hardy but fragile. She makes you genuinely care for Mary. Also Denise McCormack as Mary's Mam Suzanne is top notch too. Doesn't have much screen time but still manages to show us that she loves yet is frustrated by her daughter and that she has her own romantic issues. Actually the cast is all round good, not a dud note. Even the bit parts seem lived in. Loads of familiar faces from Love/Hate and Moone Boy on show. Even that chest shaving eejit from a recent McDonalds ad shows up.

A thoroughly entertaining film. No big flashy plot-line and nothing we haven't seen before but it's so well done that it doesn't matter. You'll laugh and probably get a little misty eyed. Plus it's just great to go to the cinema and see an Irish film with accents and places you'll recognise. 

Finally as the icing on the cake, it's only 82 minutes long. Perfect length for a film like this. Manages to do more in that time than a Judd Apatow film can do in twice the time. 

7 films worth watching in the week ahead.

Sat 10th Sept @9.45pm RTE One

Noble. Deirdre O'Kane is great in this simplistic but very absorbing biopic of Christina Noble, an Irish woman who devoted her life to helping the less unfortunate. Good to see RTE showing Irish films in a primetime slot too. More of this.

Sun 11th Sept @11am Film 4

The Producers. A Mel Brooks masterpiece about a very different musical production. Uproarously funny. Starring the late & great Gene Wilder. Great sunday morning fun to blow away the cobwebs.

Sun 11th Sept @11.20pm ITV3

Out Of Sight. A cracking adaption of Elmore Leonard's novel about a robber and the US marshall chasing him.Tense, violent, hilarious and with the best car boot scene you'll ever see. George Clooney & Jennifer Lopez have never been better.

Mon 12th Sept (technically Tues) @01.25 Film 4

Martha Marcy May Marlene. A haunting film about a young woman trying to re-adjust to life after leaving a cult. Elizabeth Olsen gives a performance that will stay with you for a long time. Slow moving but never boring.

Wed 14th Sept @22.00 ITV 4

Senna. Documentary about the rise of Ayrton Senna and his premature death on a F1 track. Ive no interest in racing but was totally hooked by this because of a great mix of race footage and talking heads. Very compelling watch with a heartbreaker of an ending.

Thurs 15th Sept @11.15am More 4

3.10 To Yuma. The original version. Glenn Ford & Van Heflin star in a western about an escaped convict and the farmer who gets in his way. One of the quintessential western classics.

Fri 16th Sept @23.35 BBC1

Swingers. Slightly dated but still hilarious film about 2 chaps looking for love in Los Angeles. Vince Vaughn is great in this, worth watching for his dialogue alone.

A Film A Day Keeps The Doctor Away.

A new thing i'm trying out is a look at 7 films worth looking out for on tv over the next week. Ill pick one a day and give a little info on why its worth watching.

Saturday 3rd September. Film 4 @ 6.25pm

A League Of Their Own. A very entertaining and heartwarming look at women's baseball in the 1940s. Starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis. A perfect rainy saturday evening film. 

Sunday 4th September. ITV 4 @ 10pm

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. American adaption of the Stieg Larsson novel. Starring Rooney Mara & Daniel Craig. A good little mystery thriller about a hacker and a journalist getting caught up in a decades old missing person case. Not for the faint of heart. 

Monday 5th September. TG4 @ 9pm

Alexander. Colin Farrell stars as Alexander The Great. Misunderstood when it was released but well worth a rewatch, especially if you like big epic historical films like Braveheart and El-Cid. 

Tuesday 6th September. More4 @ 11.30am 

Footsteps In The Fog. A noirish thriller about murder and blackmail set in early 20th century London. Well worth a watch if you are a fan of Hitchcock's films, especially his earlier ones. Starring Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger.

Wednesday 7th September. Film4 @ 9pm

The Kings Speech. Everyone knows this one. Cracking little film about a man overcoming a personal affliction after being thrust into a position of great power. Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter are excellent and you'll feel good after watching this.

Thursday 8th September. Syfy @ 10pm

Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home. My fave of all the Star Trek films. The crew of the enterprise have to travel back in time to save earth. Funny, tense, entertaining as hell. Even if you haven't seen the others you'll enjoy this one.

Friday 9th September. Dave @ 9pm

Pale Rider. Clint Eastwood as a mysterious stranger who helps the inhabitants of a west wild town fight back against a big time miner who wants their land. Very atmospheric western with a touch of the supernatural running through it. Western fans will love it. 

Dawn Of The Dead. My favourite Horror film ever.

I love horror films. Always have and always will. Pure ghost stories like The Haunting to psychological chillers like Jacob's Ladder to out and out gorefests like A Cat In The Brain. But without a doubt my all time favourite horror film is George A. Romero's 1978 classic Dawn Of The Dead. I was 15 the first time i saw it. Id read all about it in Dark Side magazine so knew what it was about. It was on TV one night on Moviedrome on BBC2. I was excited as hell. The version screened was a BBFC approved print that had all the gooey bits removed but it still blew my mind. I was enthralled as i watched society crumble and all pretense of civilization fly out the window. 

For those who haven't seen it (ye lucky feckers) the story goes like this. The Dead have returned to life for reasons unknown and are attacking and eating the living. A couple called Fran and Steven work for a news station and have decided to steal the traffic helicopter and fly north in a vain attempt to escape the carnage. Meanwhile a swat team has invaded a block of flats to try and get the religious residents to hand over their dead before the whole place gets infected and its here we meet swat team members Roger and Peter. Roger is a friend of Steven and is travelling north with him and Peter decides to tag along after the display of violence they have witnessed and taken part in. Eventually they end up in a shopping mall and decide to set up camp. That's all the plot ill give away. 

The acting. The acting is fine, good in places and perfunctory in others. The main actors especially Ken Foree and Gaylen Ross get the job done, it's just some of the supporting cast earlier in the film are a bit painful to watch. Romero's direction though is great as always. Its a clear, well paced film, fast moving film that still makes time for characterization. Its never boring and there's always something happening to move the story forward. Its scary, exciting, tense, knowing, funny in places, absurd in others (custard cream pies!) There are scenes in it that have you thinking "Wow, this could actually be fun" and then you see something that flat out upsets the hell out of you. 

The special fx by Tom Savini have held up well too. The silly blueish paint on the zombies and the cartoonishly coloured blood make the film feel vaguely comic book like and help make the, at times, horrific violence easier to swallow. The film shocked audiences in the late 70's. So much so that an uncut version wasn't available in Ireland until the dawn ( Get it! Dawn!! Ok, tumbleweed ) of the 21st century

Its far more than a horror film of course. Its an insightful dissection of machismo, of violence, of society and the taut threads barely holding it together and our modern day obsession with consumerism. And that's the reason why it has endured. Why its always cited by critics and is a perennial in top 10 lists. Because its more than a horror film. Its exciting and scary and actually makes you think. It has its cake and eats it too. Its a fucking masterpiece. It hooks you in with action and spectacle then engages your noggin with what lies beneath.

Romero is a very intelligent film director and writer. On the surface people might think his film are full of blood and guts and cheap thrills but there's always a subtext, always a topical commentary on events, always a brain behind the action. Jut look at Martin, The Crazies, his Zombie trilogy ( Dawn is the middle, Night Of The Living Dead and Day Of The Dead bookend it and are both excellent too), The Dark Half. All superb films. Even his sillier stuff like Creepshow, Monkey Shines and Knightriders never insulted the audience. That's why he still garners the film-going publics respect, even after his career sadly went into decline. 

The film when i first saw it was of course recorded and re-watched a silly amount of times. Once i got a DVD player i was able to purchase an uncut copy from the states which blew my mind all over again. Over the years I've owned this on a VHS i recorded, a retail VHS, a slightly less cut VHS, an uncut DVD, an uncut DVD special edition and finally a blu-ray. Yup ridiculous. Whatever the next format is, i'll probably own a copy of it on that too. And more than likely I'll watch it when it appears on Netflix. But that is fandom for you.

The Shallows. A cracker.

Sharks are lethal. And by lethal I mean deadly. And by deadly I mean cool, interesting, magnificent creatures. But by and large they haven't been the subject of many good films sadly. Jaws of course is brilliant. A perfect film. In the 41 years since it was released there have been dozens of films about sharks but sadly I can count the good ones on my left hand. Happily The Shallows ups the number of good shark films by 1.

Its a nice short film, great to see in an age of bloated blockbusters. It has a very economic storyline. A woman who has an emotional attachment to a beach goes to said beach to surf and is attacked by a gigantic great white shark and has to use her wits and skills to survive.

If you've seen the trailers you might think its just another monster vs bikini clad babe but its much better than that. Great acting and some super tension and superb scenery elevates it far above z movie schlock. Blake Lively carries the film fantastically and has some fun scenes with a co-star who's name I won't ruin.

It gets a tad silly near the end but so did Jaws and no one ever complains about that. I'd urge anyone with a love of thrills and spills to go see it. There aren't many female led genre films around these days and we should support the ones that do get released.

Spectre. A huge disappointment

Spectre. Every Bond actor makes a poor film and this one is Daniel Craig's.

Bond number 24 starts with a bang and a half. The pre-credits sequence opens with a 5 minute Steadicam shot tracking an assassination attempt all set to a backdrop of The Day Of The Dead festival in Mexico City. It's stunning and audacious. Something never before seen in a Bond film. Absolutely epic in scale. It will leave you with you jaw hanging open.

But then the film itself turns into an absolute snooze-fest. 2.5 hrs is ridiculously long for a Bond film. The middle section could lose 30 minutes easily.

Bond has discovered a secret from his past and his investigation of it brings him into contacts with the upper echelons of the criminal world. Meanwhile MI6 is in danger of being made obsolete and M has his own battle on his hands to show that the humble Double 0 programme still has a place in the modern world. Sounds exciting right! Ya its not. 

Critics of the last Bond outing 'Skyfall' (which i loved btw) accused it of being too different, of not following the Bond formula. Director Sam Mendes seems to have taken on board some of the criticism and bizarrely decided to add some of the older Bond staples to this story to create a bizarre mishmash of Moore and Connery style silliness and Craig style grittiness. It doesn't work. An airbag gag in a car chase would feel right at home in one of Moore's weaker outings but it doesn't work here. An eye gouging murder at a meeting of arch criminals. Nope doesn't work either. A baddie's lair in a crater in the desert? C'mon, that was old hat by the 70's. A very odd and creepy seduction scene of a woman we never see again afterwards. Even the addition of a proper henchman for the bad guy feels like the bastard child of Oddjob & Red Grant.

The film of course has its good points. That stunning opening 10 minutes. It looks fantastic. Craig is as always a great Bond, ruthless and funny. Ralph Fiennes is superb as M and Ben Whitsaw is good fun as Q.

The women in the cast do not fair as well. Naomie Harris & Monica Belluci especially are utterly wasted in bit parts. Lea Seydoux fairs slightly better but tbh she might as well not even be a character, just a reason for Bond to go from a to b to c.

I'm probably more disappointed than i should be but i can't help it. I'm a life long Bond fan. I don't care about the formula being changed. Do what you want but at least do it well. And keep it exciting. The one a Bond film should never be is boring and this one is boring in spades.

Hashtag sadface. 

Carrie. Another in a long line of pointless remakes.

Meh. It's a great word. I use it to describe things i don't hate but things i don't give a feck about either. Meh is how i'd describe Carrie. It's an utterly redundant remake of Brian De Palma's electrifying 1976 adaption of Stephen King's titular novel. It adds nothing to the original version and is in many ways inferior to it.

Carrie White is an introverted young girl suffering that most evil of places - American high school. She was raised by her religious nutjob of a mother and knows nothing of the wider world. The story kicks off after her P.E. class. She's in the shower, and experiences her first period but because her mother has never taught her anything about her body, she think's she's dying. Her bloody indignity is laughed at, filmed and as is sadly the case these days, uploaded to the internet.

Some after Carrie experiences another first. Telekinetic powers. When she is sad or angry, things go flying ( to put it mildly). Soon after she experiences the joys and hate of school life until everything comes to a head at her high school dance and all hell breaks loose.

The climax of the 1976 film was dizzyingly inventive. De Palma used split screen to present the carnage from a multitude of angles. It was intoxicating viewing. Mind-blowing to a 70's audience. Bravura stuff. The 2013 version is dull as dishwater. Identikit teens being burned and electrocuted and crushed. If you can't tell them apart how are you supposed to care apart what's happening on-screen. Proper horror requires a gut reaction and this won't give you anything resembling that. It's not a bad film. The story before the climax isn't bad, it's just as i said earlier, meh.

Carrie is played by Chloe Moretz. A fine young actress who blew us away in 2010 as Hitgirl in Kick-Ass. She plays the part well but she's just too pretty too be believable as a high school pariah. Sissy Spacek looked the part in the original version and then some.  Her religious freak of a mother is played by Julianne Moore. A favourite actress of mine. She is actually good in the part. Broad but not too manic. Her performance is actually one of the only improvements on the original. Piper Laurie played the part in 76 and was hammy as hell.

Watch it, don't watch it, you won't be missing anything if you don't see it. Not scary enough for horror fans, not bloody enough for gorehounds. But contains some good acting.

The very definition of meh.

What Richard Did. The best Irish film of this century.

Sometimes all it takes is a kick to change your life.

Richard Karlsen has it all. He's a good looking chap, has a loving family, friends who look up to him, skill with a rugby ball, a beach house and most importantly to him, he's very popular with the ladies.

It's the summer before he goes to college and he wants to make the most of it. He sets his sights on Lara and from here events conspire to change the course of his life.

To say anymore would spoil this magnificent film. 

It's main theme would be loss of innocence but the underlying stronger subtext is saying that if you have the money and the means you can more or less do what you want with impunity. Some may call this cynical but events ( specifically the Club Annabel death on which this is loosely based ) show it to to be the sad truth.

The acting, from a mostly unknown cast, across the board is superb. On paper Richard, played by newcomer Jack Reynor, sounds like someone people would love to hate but he's a really nice chap. Not clichéd at all. Treats the girls with respect and even looks after the younger lads, who in other films would be the butt of jokes. Its a layered performance. Even when he's being nice, you can see the gears turning in his head, and you get the sense that he could use violence as a solution to his problems

Róisín Murphy plays Lara, the girl Richard falls for. She's a nice girl, who gets her head turned when the rugby star shows an interest in her. Its not a showy role but she plays it well. Lars Mikkelsen (Brother of Mads) plays Richard's father. It's a fantastic performance. A man who will do anything for his son. The inner turmoil is clear in his eyes. A confession scene between father and son in the latter half of the film is devastating. The anger and grief is palpable and pours off the screen. It's one of the best things i have ever seen in an Irish film.

The film is directed by Lenny Abrahamson ( who directed the wonderful Adam & Paul and the Cannes award winning Garage ) and written by Malcolm Campbell. And its fantastic on both counts. Low key but explosive at points. Subtle yet cutting. Funny then horrific. It looks superb too. This is a Dublin we don't get to see on screen very often. D4 Dublin, all transatlantic accents and tree lined avenues. It makes a nice change from the poverty and crime we usually see.

A superb, shocking and evocative portrait of modern day Ireland.

Midnight Run. My favourite comedy.

"I got two words for you. Shut the fuck up!". The most quoted line in this comedy masterpiece says it all.

Ok, big statement here but i really think this is one of the funniest films ever made. Some may scoff and mention the likes of Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keating or such classics as It Happened One Night & Some Like It Hot. But I'm going to stick to my guns on this one. It's a perfect comedy. It delivers the big belly laughs and gives you characters that you make an emotional connection with and truly care about come the end credits.

It's a buddy comedy but differs from the norm in that the central pairing are on either side of the law. Robert De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter trying to bring Jonathan Mardukas, a mob accountant played by Charles Grodin, cross country. All the while trying to avoid rival unscrupulous bounty hunters and Mafia goons out to kill Mardukas as they believe he embezzled mob boss Jimmy Serrano played by the great Dennis Farina.

Its basically Planes, Trains And Auto mobiles with added gunplay and profanity and its every bit as good as that sounds. Walsh is a hard ass who slowly comes to like his charge, Murdukas is a criminal with a heart of gold who brings out Walsh's humanity and Farina is a permanently angry Mafia cliché who wants to stick pencils in peoples hearts.

De Niro is on flying form here. He plays up to his bad bastard image but then subverts it into something hilarious. You can actually see him transforming on screen. Charles Grodin is brilliant too. Hilarious and annoying in equal measure. Dennis Farina makes the most of a thankless part. He's plays the part of a violent gangster but makes sure his threats are sprinkled with a bit of fun so as not to ruin the mood of the film. There's also some great support from Yaphet Kotto, John Ashton ("HEY MARVIN!!") & Joe Pantaliono.

The film doesn't do anything new but what it does it does well. The interplay between the leads is a joy. The dialogue is sparkling. Profane but hilarious. Some films use the F word as a punchline but not this. It never feels gratuitous. The action scenes are shoddy but it all adds
to the charm.

Hopefully this review will explain why i like this film so much. As mentioned earlier its so well written and acted you really do care about the characters. That's so refreshing in this day and age when most comedy characters are crude caricatures. Just vehicles for a punchline. Look at The Hangover for example. Yes it's funny but can you honestly say you care about any of the leads? I thought so.

Django Unchained.

I was 15 the first time i saw a Quentin Tarantino film. It was Reservoir Dogs in a flea pit cinema in Tullamore. I couldn't believe my Father was bringing me and my friends to see this film we had heard so much about. It was supposedly the ultimate bloodfest. Something that earned you respect if you could sit the whole way through it. Happily it was something so much more than that. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time but i knew i was seeing something special. At a time when all i wanted in a film was violence and nudity, this paved the way for my love of pithy and fastly spoken, interesting dialogue. It was funny in a way i'd never experienced before. Profane sure but with a poetry to it as well. Suffice to say. i loved the film and still do.

Over the next 20 yrs QT tried his hand at a few different genres, war, blaxploitation, horror even Kung Fu to  varying degrees of success. I watched them all and loved even the bad ones. But as a big fan of westerns i always wondered if he would ever try his hand at one. It was too much to hope for. But then one day i was reading Empire and i saw the news i had been waiting for. QT was thinking of remaking Django, the spaghetti western starring Franco Nero.

Fast forward 4 or 5 yrs and the film was finally realised. And man it was worth waiting for. Its a remake in name only but he has made the film his own. And non QT fans will be happy to know that the film is in chronological order, something that has been a bugbear for quite a few.

Django is a slave who is rescued by Dr King Schultz who needs him to identify a three brother gang so he can, as a bounty hunter, legally kill them and claim the reward for their capture. Django goes along with this because the 3 brothers tortured him and sold his wife, Broomhilda, into slavery and this is the only realistic way he can ever get revenge on them and see his beloved again. Django and Dr King become friends and team up to get Django's wife back when they discover she has been sold to Calvin Candie, the owner of a Mississippi slave plantation called Candy Land.

Its a simple story. Its been told many times before but what transforms this into something special is the calibre of the acting and writing.

Jamie Foxx plays the title role in the film. He's economical with his words and actions but this means what he does and says has real power behind it. He's perfectly fine in the part but i cant help but wonder what original choice Will Smith would have done with the role. Kerry Washington plays the part of Broomhilda Von Shaft. A German speaking house slave and the love of Django's life. She's very good in a woefully underwritten part. Id be amazed if she has more than 10 minutes screen-time in the entire film. Christoph Waltz plays Dr King Schultz. A German ex dentist turned Bounty hunter. He is superb in his part and fully deserved his Academy award. In other hands this part could have been wildly over the top but Waltz gladly keeps the showiness to the minimum. Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio who plays slave owner Calvin Candy. He plays the part with snarling relish. Spitting racial epitaphs all over the place and wallowing in bloodlust. A lot of A-list actors would be terrified of this role but Leo really gets into it, throws all caution to the wind and is so much the better for it. But the main villain of the piece is the head house slave played by QT regular Samuel L. Jackson. He is what was known back then as an Uncle Tom. A black man who has sided with the slave owners to help subjugate his own people in an effort to make his own life better. You can see in him a lifetime of bitterness and self hatred and this makes him the real black heart of the piece. Its a career best performance and its a crying shame he wasn't recognised by the Academy for the part.

There is also fine support from the likes of Walton Goggins as slave driver Billy Crash, and Don Johnson as the first plantation owner to have to misfortune of trying to bump heads with our two heroes. And a lovely little cameo from Franco Nero as a man who knows full well that "The D is silent".

Tarantino as usual fills the air with his wonderful dialogue. It never feels forced or overwrought and best of all, you could just sit there and listen to it for ages. A dinner party scene with the main cast talking around a table lasts 20 minutes but feels like 5.

A cracking film that I'd recommend this to anyone. As long as they aren't squeamish!