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This film is powerful, sure, very emotional and raw in a lot of ways ... but I actually found myself laughing a lot more than I expected, at the humanness of it all.

It is a long film - 2 hours and 17 minutes or something - but the time disappeared and final credits rolled before I knew it. It is one of those rare films that doesn't feel like a film, so much as real life.

Main character Lee (Casey Affleck) - amazing, speaks volumes when he says nothing, carrying pain - learns that, after his brother's death, he has been named guardian of his 16 year old nephew (Lucas Hedges) - also a very real character, excellent authentic depiction of a 16 year old, even in the way he deals with his father's death.

Michelle Williams is Lee's ex-wife - and even with small amount of screen time, she blows you away, also with the pain she's been carrying. Gretchen Mol and Matthew Broderick are also great in a very awkward but amazingly authentic scene.

So yeah - believe the hype, the film's amazing, gritty, real, emotional - but the humanness of the story will make you smile more than you might expect from the material.

I'm a devout Woody Allen fan but even for me there are three categories of Woody films: 1. Perfect, 2. Solid entries in the canon and 3. The 'weaker' films (which are still better than much of the cr@p that gets made).

This one is definitely solid. Great atmosphere, great actors, entertaining story-line. I don't think it breaks barriers but I also don't think it needs to.

Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) moves to LA to work for his uncle Phil (Steve Carrell). He meets and falls in love with Phil's assistance Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) - who's seeing someone else. Much of the film is around that love triangle.

The start of the film perhaps held the promise of a Perfect Woody Allen film - especially a GREAT scene between Bobby and a novice escort (Anna Camp) who comes over. I actually laughed out loud just thinking about it.

The other characters' story lines feel a bit secondary and under-developed - back in New York, Bobby's family members get not-quite-enough screen time to really feel fleshed out, and yet are focused on enough to start to draw you in. In particular, Bobby's gangster brother Ben (Corey Stoll) ends up being a bit two-dimensional. As Bobby's other love interest, Veronica (Blake Lively) is beautiful but we never really learn much about her, or get much development about their relationship.

These are middling complaints and are really just to explain why this is an 8 and not a 9 or 10. It's a strong entry in Woody's filmography and well worth seeing for Woody fans.

As always, Tarantino commands the viewer's attention effortlessly. Once again, there are brilliant characters, snappy dialogue, and violence almost elevated to an art form. It's buckets of fun.

The "hateful eight" aren't good guys. There are two bounty hunters (Jackson, Russell), a criminal on her way to be hung (Jason Leigh), a new sheriff (Goggins), an elderly general who used to be a confederate (Dern), a hangman (Roth) and a 'cowboy' (Madsen). They're trapped in a cabin during a blizzard. And so the premise is, Kurt Russell's bounty hunter says: "One of those men's not who he says he is".

It's a tantalizing mystery, a hook, and I would never spoil anything for anyone. Except to say I sort of expected...more. The entire film is captivating but the first half is perfection; the second half gets a bit messy. It's like an Agatha Christie book - a needlessly convoluted murder plot is revealed... when in fact the whole thing SURELY could've been done a little easier? It gets messy, and even though the last few scenes are a lot of blood-n-guts-y fun, I walked away feel a tiny bit short-changed. Tarantino's earlier two films, Django and Inglourious, always leave me feeling exhausted, elated, inspired, excited. This one left me a bit ... meh.

Still, any Tarantino is better than none at all, and a 7/10 is hardly a bad review. It's hard trying to outdo yourself when you've set the bar too high. I still say this is a must-watch!