Sukiyaki Western Django (Takashi Miike, 2007)

You can never know what to expect from prolific Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, but here he's working pretty clearly within genre boundaries. The genre in question, as the title implies, is samurai spaghetti western, and he finds a tone here similar to Kill Bill, situated somewhere between homage, mashup, and parody. Appropriately enough, Quentin Tarantino shows up here, in a small role, and sets the tone from the start, delivering his lines in amusingly broken English. What follows borrows Yojimbo's plot and uses it to present a series of goofy backstories, oddball characters and exciting shootouts. There are some slow patches here and there, but this is easily Miike's best big-budget effort to date.

Rating: 64/100