The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

14. 2012 - Django Unchained

Django Unchained Jamie Foxx
Sony

Honourable Mentions: Argo, The Hunt, Lincoln

Like Inglourious Basterds before it, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is a story of righteous revenge - an antebellum warpath that tells the story of freed slave Django (Jamie Foxx) and his quest to rescue his beloved Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Tarantino's eighth film also reteamed him with Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz, with the Austrian actor reversing moral polarity by playing a charismatic hero in Dr. King Schultz instead of a charismatic villain.

It's a winning combination once again, with Tarantino bringing to bear his love for Spaghetti Westerns in a similar genre landscape, pulling notes from Sergios Leone and Corbucci while accompanied by a soundtrack that fuses Ennio Morricone with hip hop and R&B.

Django Unchained is perhaps overdrawn in some regards, stretching past the two-hour 45-minute mark while lacking the taut pacing of the even beefier The Hateful Eight, but when the sparks start flying and squibs erupt like boiling geysers from the worst humanity has to offer, it's hard not to feel giddy about the carnage unfolding.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.