Pitch perfect. The ultimate Tarantino. Gratuitous violence has never been so fun. A miscast Leonardo DiCaprio – although not as bad as Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds  – was my only quibble, but all the other actors were so great it hardly mattered. Samuel L. Jackson was Oscar-worthy, but Christoph Walz was on a higher plane still; just seeing his character’s picture in a newspaper makes me smile.  Part of the movie’s brilliance was that while the subject of slavery was never absent from the picture, it was never its overt subject. Instead, the plot revolved around bounty-hunting! Dr. King Schultz expressed his disdain for the practice but then accepted it as a given; so we in the audience had our emotions entangled without being beaten over the head. All the scenes caused visual echoes of deeply embedded images from childhood Westerns, and then there was the incongruous music, from spaghetti western to hip-hop to Jim Croce, making you feel, but keeping you just enough detached or off-balance. What’s coming next? Who knows, but it’s sure to be violent and fun.

The novel staged as a series of tableaux. At first I found it corny, like a Broadway musical sans music; but by the time I figured out, more or less, who was who, I had fallen into Joe Wright’s rhythm and had no more complaint. Keira Knightley was quite good, and lovely as usual, but if I hadn’t known from the start that her suicide was coming I don’t know how it would have struck me. The artificial staging created an emotional distance; I watched Anna throw herself under the train (but how did she do it?) as another act in the play, without feeling anything. The attraction between Anna and Vronsky was palpable and credible, but not as mesmerizing as that in Silver Linings Playbook

The great Christopher Walken is enough to enjoy this murder-comedy, but there are plenty of other wonderful performances: Colin Farrell as the procrastinating screenwriter, Woody Harrelson as the dog-loving gangster kingpin, Tom Waits as…Tom Waits?, and Sam Rockwell as the lead psychopath. The setup is rather primitive – for a reason that only appears after the credits – but the tongue-in-cheek humor is always intelligent, as befits a Martin McDonagh screenplay. Rarely has killing seemed so lighthearted, or dognapping so funny.