Michael Cunningham

Intriguing, funny, dark and beautifully filmed and acted.

A ludicrously gap filled, B-grade screenplay masquerading as some sort of social conscience. This is a scaffold for a gross and gruesome voyeuristic celebration of gratuitous violence, involving exploding heads and liberal ketchup effects. In that’s your thing, here it is, but don’t confuse it with story telling, social history, #metoo or #blacklivesmatter. This film is a gummy pastiche, unsure whether it is drama or comedy. It is super-real fantasy cinema muddling Antebellum with Jim Crow. It is too explicitly sadistic to portray the mundane cruelty of slavery. The females are utterly characterless weepy maidens or pliable hostesses with little to say and no part to play. They are pawns in Tarantino’s universe of misogyny. The author of this trash makes a curious hammy entry as a misplaced Australian miner with a bad fake accent. And it’s all way too long. What a pile of crud.