Django Unchained * * *
Cert 18, 165 mins

Quentin Tarantino’s latest bloody offering has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and five Baftas.

Christoph Waltz was handed a Golden Globe for his performance and Tarantino took the Best Screenplay honours.

Looking at these facts, you’d think the spaghetti western movie was a major tour de force. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is.

Waltz is certainly the best thing about Django Unchained and the script is sparkling in parts, but as a whole the film disappoints. It’s entertaining but flawed and not as good as his previous work, Inglourious Basterds.

It starts off promisingly enough, but by the time I’d sat through nearly three hours of shoot-outs, whippings and brutal beatings, I had lost interest.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave in Texas in 1858, bought by dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Waltz) because he can identify wanted men the Brittle Brothers.

In a highly unusual and enlightened move for the times, Schultz frees Django and teams up with him to hunt criminals. “Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like,” is Django’s view.

Waltz agrees to help his new friend track down and rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), a slave owned by sadistic Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Samuel L Jackson ages up to play Candie’s right hand man Stephen, as bigoted as his owner.

Schultz is a great character and Waltz delivers his lines with style.

The dialogue is occasionally brilliant and there are some amusing scenes, such as when Django gets to chose his own flamboyant clothes.

“You’re free? You mean you wanna dress like that?” is one incredulous response.

The film is well shot and scenic, but Tarantino hasn’t got any better at editing his work. Scenes still drag on for far too long, and there are too many slow-motion tricks. The score is also distractingly loud.

If you watch a Tarantino film, you expect violence, but Django Unchained is particularly nasty.

One bare-knuckle fight to the death involving a hammer to the head is bone-crunchingly gruesome, and the bloody body count during the climactic shoot-out is ludicrous.

And while the repeated use of the controversial N word may have been historically accurate, and is used by blacks as well as whites, it really jars.

Tarantino’s acting hasn’t improved any, so we could have done without his brief cameo with a bizarre Australian accent. We’re use to Tarantino’s films being multi-layered with several plots going on at once, but Django Unchained is a little too simple and, dare I say, dull.

Slavery seems to be the theme of January 2013.

Last week the Les Miserables cast sang “the music of a people who will not be slaves again”.

This week it’s Django, and next week it’s Abraham Lincoln’s fight to end slavery in another Oscar-tipped movie, Lincoln.

Of the three, I’d say Django is probably the least satisfying, unless you’re a major Tarantino fan. RL

The Sessions * * * *
Cert 15, 93 mins

There aren’t many A-list actresses who would ever go topless, still less one willing to go full frontal.

So hats – and everything else off – to Helen Hunt, a best actress Oscar winner in 1998 for As Good As It Gets, now given another nod for her extraordinary supporting role here.

The Sessions is based on the real life of poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, left severely disabled after contracting polio in childhood.

He reaches a certain point in his seriously-restricted adult life where he would like to experience full sex.

And so, with the blessing of his therapist and a ludicrously long-haired priest called Father Brendan (William H Macy), he is visited by ‘sex surrogate’ Cheryl, played by Hunt.

She introduces her new patient to the benefit of her caring, personal touches and promises him the full monty within six sessions.

Written and directed by Ben Lewin (Georgia, 1988), a veteran Polish director now in his mid 60s, The Sessions is a remarkably sympathetic film about the sexual desires of somebody often confined to an iron lung.

The machine might have been explained more, along with the impact such work has on Cheryl’s own family life, but the overall theme from O’Brien’s point of view is so uplifting it will give anyone of limited means the hope there is someone out there for them.

After French ‘disability’ films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Rust and Bone (2012), The Sessions finally proves that Hollywood can take physical incapacity and/or sex far more seriously than it does the potential side effects of shooting so many people on screen so often.

It certainly gives a mature actress like Hunt – 50 in June – the chance to prove that older stars still have plenty to offer.

She might well lose out to Anne Hathaway’s performance in Les Mis on Oscar night, but this is one of the most challenging roles I’ve ever seen any actress take on board. So much so that Hawkes, a best supporting actor Oscar contender for Winter’s Bone two years ago, is unlucky not to have had another nomination himself. GY

Jagten – The Hunt * * * *
Cert 15, 115 mins

Recommending a film about child abuse feels, on the face of it, a bit like being a pusher and expecting ‘clean’ readers to try a bit of heroin.

In a similar vein, so to speak, why would anybody in search of silver screen fulfilment want to wade through the subtitles of a Danish film about the most heinous crime of all?

The difference is that while medical evidence suggests taking heroin will simply diminish your life, The Hunt can only enlighten it – as this year’s BAFTA nomination for a non-English film has recognised.

Still only nine, Quvenzhané Wallis might have earned herself a best actress Oscar nomination this month for Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I defy anyone not to think that Annika Wedderkopp’s performance is no less impressive as Klara, a young girl who falsely accuses teacher Lucas of something he hasn’t done.

As if the newly-divorced Lucas hasn’t already got enough on his plate, with problems over access to his own son to boot.

Lucas is played brilliantly by Mads Mikkelsen, star of Casino Royale in 2006 and of last year’s superb Danish period thriller, A Royal Affair – now deservedly Oscar nominated for best foreign film.

The Hunt is similarly blessed with a remarkable standard of cinematography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) and a challenging script co-written by director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen / Submarino). It works on several layers at once to mix witch hunts like Straw Dogs (1917) and The Crucible (1996) with another Danish film about abuse, Jacob Thuesen’s Accused (2005).

The Hunt is also extraordinarily topical because for months now, British news consumers have been besieged by child sex abuse stories on the back of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

High profile arrests have been publicised instantly without any thought that those under suspicious might actually be innocent.

This is a deeply intelligent, profoundly moving and often harrowing illustration of why reports of – and investigations into – sex abuse, need to be handled with the sort of care afforded to genuine victims. For all of our sakes. Otherwise, there soon might not be many good, male teachers like Lucas left.

The Hunt is showing at Warwick Arts Centre – Friday, Sunday and Monday. GY

Monsters, Inc 3D (U) * * * *
Cert U, 91mins

For light relief, adults – and, of course, children – can enjoy the re-release of a Pixar film which has now been converted into trendy 3D.

Monsters, Inc had a charity advance screening at Odeon Broadway Plaza last Sunday, when the new format proved to be better than expected, even though my inquisitive 12-year-old son kept taking his glasses off and wondering what the point of them was.

In truth, the 3D makes no real difference to a film originally released in the UK in February 2002 and which has probably only been seen in cinemas by those who are now at least teenagers.

John Goodman voices James P. “Sulley” Sullivan while Billy Crystal is Mike Wazowski, just two of the wonderfully different monsters whose purpose is to generate energy by making children scream.

But when two-year-old baby girl Boo (Mary Gibbs) supposedly puts their safety at risk by entering Monstropolis, woe betide their futures if seen by either Steve Buscemi’s fellow monster Randall.

Or, indeed, company CEO Henry J Waternoose (voiced by James Coburn, who died aged 74 just eight months after the 2002 release).

Despite its eternal message about physical differences and the importance of love over fear of the unknown, Monsters, Inc primarily remains an ambitious concept film.

So while it was no surprise that it didn’t quite hold the attention of children under seven on Sunday, the vibrant hairs on Sully were certainly a reminder of how far the then new-fangled art of computer-generated animation had already progressed since Toy Story in 1995.

Monster’s Inc was Oscar nominated four times, including best animation, but the film lost out to Shrek and only Randy Newman won for the song ‘If I Didn’t Have You’.

In terms of accessible storytelling and animation, co-director Pete Docter later made a quantum leap with Pixar’s Oscar-winning Up (2009).

He’s next slated to direct Inside Out for release in 2015, another Pixar film this time ‘told from the perspective of the emotions inside the mind of a little girl’.

Before that, though, Crystal, Goodman and Buscemi will return from July 13 with a prequel called Monsters University, directed by little known Dan Scanlon. GY