Ever the alchemist, Quentin Tarantino remains obsessed with transfiguring a mélange of homages into filmic gold.

But the director’s eighth yarn seemingly shares most of its genetics with an Agatha Christie mystery – one that giddily casts Samuel L. Jackson’s unscrupulous bounty hunter as Poirot and his exuberant pair of Smith & Wessons as Captain Hastings.

Borrowing from his canon’s two most recent entries, Tarantino stretches Inglourious Basterds’ tightly wound tavern scene around the more corpulent bulk of Django Unchained.

The result is The Hateful Eight; a claustrophobic, theatrical experiment of Hitchcockian proportions – as thrilling as it is frustrating.

The Hateful Eight is quintessential Tarantino: excessively long, indulgent to the point of distraction, but visually resplendent, admirably eccentric, and with a toothsome alloy of zingy dialogue and pandemoniac carnage.

RATING: 4/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Demián Bichir, James Parks

DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino

WRITER: Quentin Tarantino

SYNOPSIS: In the dead of a Wyoming winter, a bounty hunter and his prisoner find shelter in a cabin currently inhabited by a collection of nefarious characters.

Our reviewer caught The Hateful Eight in 70mm (as part of the film’s Special Roadshow Engagement in the US), and so should you.