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It’s happening. It’s finally happening. What was once a particularly pervasive and aggressive Internet meme is now a reality. HBO Max’s list of new releases for March 2021 is highlighted by none other than the mythical Snyder cut.

The entity now known as Zach Snyder’s Justice League will premiere on March 18. While it was originally planned to be a four-part miniseries, this recut version of 2017’s ill-fated Justice League will in fact be a four-hour movie. But perhaps even four hours won’t be enough for fans who have been waiting years for just such an event.

Read more Movies Zack Snyder’s Original Vision for Justice League Faded Long Before His Exit By Joseph Baxter Movies Justice League: How Christopher Nolan Helped Prevent Zack Snyder from Seeing the Whedon Cut By David Crow

If the Snyder Cut is not to your speed, there are plenty...

Norma Bengell dead at 78: Iconic (and controversial) Brazilian film, stage, television, and recording star made history as the first actress to be seen naked (full frontal) in a mainstream film (photo: Norma Bengell and John Herbert in ‘As Cariocas’) Norma Bengell, a sort of Brazilian Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Fonda rolled into one, died of lung cancer in her hometown of Rio de Janeiro on October 9, 2013. She was 78. Best known internationally for her leading-lady roles in several Italian-made cult classics of the mid-’60s, Norma Bengell was known in Brazil as a controversial show business veteran and for being the first “name” actress (purportedly anywhere in the world) to be seen fully naked — full frontal — in a mainstream film. Note: Hedy Lamarr, then billed as Hedy Kiesler, does swim and run around in the nude in Gustav Machaty’s 1933 Czech drama Ecstasy. However, Lamarr’s naked swimming was disguised by the water,...

(This article contains some minor spoilers for Django Unchained and be warned that most of the clips included are Nsfw)

Like many of Tarantino’s previous films Django Unchained is filled to the brim with film references. Below I’ve attempted to guide you through some of these references and links to other films.

I’ve only seen the film once at a screening and am sure that given the opportunity to sit down with the film on Blu-ray I will undoubtedly find even more, so the following is in no way definitive but hopefully provides some answers to for those wondering what Tarantino was referencing in Django Unchained. Also, most importantly, hopefully it will lead you to check out some of the films in question.

The most obvious film reference in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is right there in the title. Django was a 1966 ‘spaghetti western’ directed by...

The director tells how he transposed the violent spaghetti westerns of Sergio Corbucci to the antebellum south

Acclaimed in the United States and due for release here next month, Quentin Tarantino's western Django Unchained is the violent story of a slave on a mission to free his wife. Tarantino's biggest influences for the film, he says, were the spaghetti westerns of the Italian director Sergio Corbucci.

Any of the western directors who had something to say created their own version of the west: Anthony Mann created a west that had room for the characters played by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper; Sam Peckinpah had his own west; so did Sergio Leone. Sergio Corbucci did, too, but his was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre. His characters roam a brutal, sadistic west.

Corbucci's heroes can't really be called heroes.

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Aldo Sanbrell photographed in 2007 by John Exshaw. (Photo copyright John Exshaw. All rights reserved.)

By John Exshaw

With the death of Aldo Sanbrell, who passed away in Alicante last Saturday (10 July), aged 79, another link to the great days of Italian film-making – and the Italian Western, in particular – has been lost. The only actor to appear in all of Sergio Leone’s Westerns, Aldo was the most prominent and recognisable of all those mean-looking hombres who rode the badlands and bit the dust of Almería in those far-off days when southern Spain was the Wild West – Italian style. Asked once by a British director if he “knew how to die,” Aldo replied, “Oh yes, señor, I have been killed in many film fights here in Almería. I have died for Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson, George Scott . . . I have made 185 films and I...

I have always been moved in some way or another by film music, but no one has created a bigger lump in the throat or watered my eyes more than Ennio Morricone.

He made film music transcend the film. He made me realize that film music could invoke emotions that went beyond just playing sad or tense or action themes. His music became the emotional anchor of the films he scored. This is music that didn’t have to make you think of the film it was used in, but gives your life its own score. I know that may be getting a little carried away, but that’s how I’ve always viewed it.

Being a (very) amateur composer myself, I always fall back on not just his work but the context of how it’s placed in movies. The few cues that were written before filming especially in...