Popular reviews

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 7

  A brutally violent mudcaked death town that’s like some hellworld where just about everyone is a morally vacant lowlife... with bodies piled high amongst the blood soaked mud and Franco Nero (and his blue eyes) becoming a legend in a swift 93 minute plate of spaghetti with extra (blood) red sauce. Maybe the best cemetery in a movie?

  Find me a better mythological legend that carries around a crustified filth soaked coffin with a machine gun inside of it that mows down trash people.

  I’ll wait.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  Corbucci boils down the entire subgenre, still in its infancy, to a single stunning, ridiculous visual metaphor, some kind of intimate myth. Spectacular.

  Revenge is a drag.

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  Review by Sean Baker 17

  I purchased an original Italian poster of Django recently and it inspired me to revisit the classic. So I watched the Argent Films Blu-ray because the Arrow box set that was released in January is out of print and selling for close to $200 on Amazon and Ebay. I really would love to check out the amazing extras on that disc but looks like I'll have to wait until a re-release.

  Arrow Films Extras:
  • Audio commentary by film critic, historian and theorist Stephen Prince
  • Newly filmed interview with star Franco Nero (26:07)
  • Newly filmed interview with assistant director Ruggero Deodato (25:48)
  • Newly filmed interview with co-writer Franco Rossetti (10:16)
  • Newly filmed interview with Sergio Corbucci…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 6

  an improvised revolver sticking out of a tombstone cross covered in blood as the cowboy with the mangled hands steps over the muddy corpses on his way out of town is one of the greatest final images of all time. the ghostly mood of wandering a hellish world of power and violence and racism, the coffin reveal, the score; will never get tired of this movie. corbucci 🐐 (new 4k arrow blu looks incredible)

  full discussion on episode 76 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 9

  "If you're a coffin maker, you sure did pick a good town to settle."

  Really hard to talk about anything but the brilliant visual metaphor of an outlaw dragging his own coffin behind him through the blood-soaked mud of the badlands. Simultaneously symbolic of the burden of mortality and the price of vengeance, encapsulating both the existentialism of the vanishing frontier and the desperate violence of personal ethical codes in a lawless, uncivilized land.

  There's an incredible precision in the direction here that translates into tremendously evocative imagery (the famous profile shot of Django with his head low, his hat pulled down over his eyes, as he glances sidelong at the man entering the saloon, as if smelling the evil…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★½ 21

  Action! - Spaghetti alla Sergio: Il West violentemente divertente di Corbucci

  For every great filmmaker, there is one film that marks the zenith of their career, the point at which they may retire with the assurance that their name will live on in the collective unconscious of moviegoers and film buffs alike, no matter what happens.

  Something that sprang to mind almost immediately was just how Django feels like a response to Leone and Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, from much of its aesthetic to the fact that Nero resembles a shorter, stockier version of Clint Eastwood. But that doesn'tmean in any way that Django is a figure that is doomed to live in the shadow of another, and…

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★ 1

  A great “what’s in the box” movie. 

  Maybe the muddiest western I’ve ever seen.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★½ 3

  A mildly sluggishly paced first half does almost nothing to dilute one of the all-time great movie heroes (complete with one of the all-time great movie hero theme songs).

  What struck me this time around is how bifurcated Django the movie and Django the character are - in the first half, he's almost Batman-like, with his hat pulled over his eyes and dispassionately blowing people away with his pistol and then with (spoiler alert!) his machine gun. Then, he meets up with the Mexicans, his hat comes off, and all of a sudden he's a human being. It's a weird counterpoint to Eastwood's Man With No Name, and a dynamic I'd somehow not noticed before.

  The sequence with Django taking back his gold is one of my favorite set-pieces ever, and a great example of the "cinema of process." And the whole movie takes place in a believably (but still entertainingly) scuzzy and evil world. Beautiful!

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 47

  Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” is a film hewn from mud and indignation. 

  Underexposed in the dirty elements to the point of near greyscale — excepting for its copious bursts of bright red blood - merely viewing “Django” will put hair on your chest. And you’ll say “Thank you, Maestro Corbucci,” for it. 

  “Django” lies somewhere between neorealism and genre film fantasy. Its hero wears clothes seemingly borrowed off the backs of Italian peasant farmers. But he lugs a coffin with a machine gun inside it behind him. It’s a visual manifestation of the movie’s dual-track heritage. Its costumer was the wife of Roberto Rossellini; while the visual of a coffin-dragging protagonist was apparently cribbed from the pages of a comic book. …

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★½

  DJANGOOOOOOOOOOO (Djangoo) HAVE YOU ALWAYSS BEEN ALOOONE!

  Super catchy.

  After The Great Silence, this seems to show much more of Corbucci’s playful side. Even when things get intense, it seems much less consequential than The Great Silence.

  Franco Nero plays Django perfectly, rivaling Eastwood with his handsome stoicism.

  Despite having quite fun scenes and moments, it drags more than the other spaghetti westerns I’d seen recently which is why it’s knocked slightly down a notch. Still, very memorable. Excited to keep working through these Corbucci films!

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 10

  *Uncut version with original Italian dubbing*

  Corbucci's immortal Spaghetti Western legend is not the culmination of his aesthetic and directorial idiosyncrasies, but it is an over-the-top, revolutionary constituent of a movement that would find its audiovisual and thematic foundations in the chauvinism, racism, stylistic gunplay, brutal violence, excellent soundtracks and the Mexican Revolution. Corbucci steps aside from the camp of a Navajo Joe and invades every frame with extraordinary style, razor-sharp editing and the destruction of the western preconceptions regarding the final outcome of the protagonistic personal justice applier. Yes, in a way it is reminiscent from Kurosawa's ronin formula, but redefines it under terms of the need of being loved, the need to forget the pain of loss and…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 6

  A mud and blood helltown with one of the most gothic looking cemetery’s I’ve ever seen—and Franco Nero taking out trash pigs by the dozen. Essential mudcaked other worldly spaghetti violence with one of the best endings I’ve ever seen. 

  
  A tale of tales.