While it may not be replete with quotable dialogue and obvious pop culture references, Quentin Tarantino's bloody revenge Western Django Unchained is his best work since the glory days of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Two years before the American Civil War, dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) frees enslaved Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him identify a trio of outlaws he is after.
However, the German soon discovers that Django has a knack for bounty hunting and the two team-up.
Django isn't just interested in the money though, he wants to track down - and free - his wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), a fellow slave.
The bounty hunting duo track her to an infamous plantation run by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has a penchant for "mandingo fighting" - brutal, to-the-death, bare-knuckle contests between slaves.
Arriving at the plantation, and posing as a pair of businessmen interested in buying a fighter, the duo arouse the suspicion of Candie's house-slave Stephen (Samuel L Jackson), who senses a connection between Broomhilda and Django.
Reinventing the Spaghetti Western genre for a modern audience, Django Unchained's daunting two hour 50 minute running time shouldn't discourage anyone from watching - it's thoroughly engrossing and while packed to the gills with vile and obnoxious characters, be assured they get their comeuppance. For all its modernity, this is still a classic Western after all.
And there are a lot of foul characters in this movie, as it is depicting a disgraceful time when racial prejudice and slavery was common place and people were treated as property to be disposed of as their owners saw fit.
But this state of affairs is never glorified - it is there to be reviled and, in one laugh-out-loud scene, ridiculed (the lynch mob with their ill-fitting masks is a classic and would not have felt out of place in Blazing Saddles).
Being a Tarantino film - and a Western - there are, of course, gun fights, which become increasingly bloody as the number of participants increase and the Grand Guignol factor is ramped up. While the violence is shocking in parts, much is so over-the-top as to be cartoon-like.
Such a great film, it's almost churlish to highlight its one low-point, but it's a frequent flaw in Tarantino's movies: his cameo.
In the final act of Django Unchained, Tarantino pops up looking like an uncomfortable 21st Century dude in fancy dress - rather than a 19th Century cowboy - with an accent that travels all around the world before you realise he's supposed to be Australian.
Thankfully, his time on screen doesn't last long, but eventually someone needs to sit him down and tell him that while he's a brilliant writer and director, he really can't cut it as an actor.
Seriously, one day, his ego is going to demand he take a more central role in one of his films and he could sink it single-handedly.