http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/12/16/the-hateful-eight-review

Westerns weren't always just shoot 'em-ups, as a film buff like Tarantino obviously knows. The westerns of the 1950s-'70s smuggled in political messages, too, and The Hateful Eight embraces that tradition. Tarantino's film is very much about race relations in America, the story's post-Civil War setting actually allowing for an exploration of some very contemporary issues... This is arguably Tarantino's most nuanced and adult tale yet.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/hateful-eight/review/

The fact that the film is set at an undetermined point shortly after the end of the American Civil War is obviously no accident. Minnie’s Haberdashery becomes America writ small, fraught with all the hideous, baked-in racial tension that lingers in the United States to this day. (At one point, the room is even divided into rival North and South areas.)

And while its eight inhabitants might be individually despicable, they’re also a product of their shared history, and their fates are all but predetermined as soon as they walk through the Haberdashery’s door. William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past has these people between its teeth.

http://screencrush.com/the-hateful-eight-review/

Those willing to put in the time will find a movie that is both beautiful and hideous, funny and shocking, and even thoughtful on occasion; once it’s fully occupied, Minnie’s Haberdashery becomes something of a microcosm of America, one that, in Tarantino’s jaundiced view, is a melting pot where everyone gets burned. Those in power can’t be trusted, and neither can the people they’re protecting. You can take away people’s guns, but they’ll always find more.

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/12/23/the-hateful-eight-review-tarantinos-latest-a-bloody-good-time

With his love of genre, violence, salty language and often despicable characters whom we learn to appreciate from a safe distance, Quentin Tarantino courts controversy along with loathing, love and respect.

So it is that The Hateful Eight — a western set in the Rocky Mountains years after the U.S. Civil War — has become a lightning rod for that controversy. Despite its 19th century period story, Tarantino deliberately was writing and directing a picture about 21st century racial violence and police brutality.

Even if the film itself does not spell out its metaphor — because the filmmaker is an artist and an auteur, not a demagogue — Tarantino and his muse and star actor Samuel L. Jackson have spelled out its meaning in public statements. A multitude of American policemen have vowed to boycott the film, primarily for what Tarantino has said about his motives.

The Hateful Eight is a lesser work than his masterpiece Pulp Fiction, or his savage WWII fantasy Inglourious Basterds or his powerful slave-western Django Unchained. It does have its own glory, however, and a whole posse of incredible characters, few of them heroic or even clean and respectable. Layer in Tarantino’s sparkling dialogue, explode the joint with a lot of swearing and ’N’ bombs and The Hateful Eight is a crackling yarn with a deep well of meaning and socio-political commentary.

http://www.avclub.com/review/quentin-tarantino-gets-theatrical-70mm-western-hat-229377?

Stubbornly theatrical, Quentin Tarantino’s three-hour snowed-in Western The Hateful Eight is a difficult movie by a director who’s not known for making them. Slow in the early going, it withholds almost all overt action until just before the intermission, at which point it explodes into the meanest, most gruesome and nihilistic violence of Tarantino’s career, only to conclude on a disquieting note of hope. Shot in 70mm, but largely set in one room, this is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes. The American ideal was only ever a lie, says The Hateful Eight, but in the end, when the floorboards are slicked with blood and brain matter, and the fatally wounded have enacted a ritualistic parody of justice, it looks toward that same ideal with the hope that one day, someone will be suckered by it hard enough to make it come true. Who could have predicted that Quentin Tarantino, director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, would eventually turn into a political filmmaker?

The Hateful Eight stakes territory previously worked by Sam Peckinpah and the more politically conscious of the spaghetti Westerns, but it owes just as much to John Carpenter’s The Thing, with which it shares a star, a composer, and a whole lot more. The claustrophobic set-up—seven bad men and a feral woman, trapped in a Wyoming roadhouse—brings out the worst in an ugly bunch, and it comes out at first in slurs and pointed fingers, and then in sprays of bloody vomit and gunshots that blow heads and nutsacks clean off. But even if a lot of it is played for laughs, this is still the first Tarantino movie that might be called a drama...

Though he’s characterized as a fetishist who makes movie-movies, most of Tarantino’s reference points and influences (blaxploitation films, revisionist Westerns, New Wave-era Jean-Luc Godard movies, etc.) are very political; given the lengths he’s gone to imitate their sense of cool, perhaps it was inevitable that he’d develop a political conscience. Here, there is talk of violence in law enforcement, and the only black man among the eight speaks at length about being seen as a threat. Tarantino still can’t resist a signifying reference (in The Hateful Eight, characters are named after underrated directors, lesser B-movie starlets, and John Ford bit players), but they’re no longer the main draw. It used to be that when an American director had something to say about fundamental values, they went and made a Western, and making Westerns is just about all Tarantino has been doing as of late...

At the center of this long, deliberate movie sits the complex figure of Warren, the bounty hunter who was once himself a wanted man, and the image of Lincoln, whose death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth is spoken of as though it were Biblical. For the eight, snowed in with their prejudices and their paranoia and their itchy trigger fingers, venerating Honest Abe expresses a belief in something better than themselves, regardless of which side of the Civil War they fought on. (Heck, even Birth Of A Nation worshipped Lincoln.) And in a finale reminiscent of Pulp Fiction’s enigmatic endpoint, when the ugly American past and present they’ve given voice to has degraded and de-evolved into a caveman instinct of violence and retribution, the remaining characters gather to marvel at what a beautiful idea America could be—one of the few really moving scenes in Tarantino’s highly stylized body of work.