I am a bit worried I might be a massive racist because last week at a preview screening* I laughed like a hallucinating pig several times during Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a preposterous cartoon romp through the laugh-a-minute world of slavery.

It's insanely violent. In one shootout, so much blood gets sloshed across the screen it's a miracle a scab didn't form over the lens. Despite, or perhaps because of this, it also contains some of the funniest moments I've seen in ages. What it does, brilliantly, is to gradually heighten the tension until you forget you're watching a dumb exploitation flick and start to take it all terribly seriously, before suddenly exploding into the kind of wilful silliness you'd expect to see in a Python movie. It's three hours long, but feels far shorter, with the final 60 seconds being particularly good.