Those lucky enough to attend the Cannes Film Festival got to see a sneak peek of Quentin Tarantino‘s upcoming film Django Unchained. As you can imagine, those who saw it said it was nothing short of brilliant. So while we await footage from the movie to appear – it has been confirmed that there is a trailer attached to Prometheus – we got a collection of new photos, which should be more than enough to whet your appetite.

Tarantino’s spaghetti western-esque film star follows Django (Jamie Foxx) has he partners up with a German dentist turn bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from twisted plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Quentin Tarantino‘s upcoming “southern” Django Unchained won’t be hitting theaters until Christmas, but in the meantime the Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures have released the film’s first poster.

You can check it out here below.

No cruddy Photoshop hack work here folks, this is the real deal. Tarantino has spoken many times in the past about his unabashed love for Italian spaghetti westerns and how they have influenced his own style of filmmaking. Several of his recent films, including Kill Bill V.2 and Inglourious Basterds, have worn that influence with pride. Tarantino has even used music score cues composed for the best Italian westerns by the great Ennio Morricone on the soundtracks of some of his past features. Thus, it’s very fitting that the poster for Django Unchained would recall the minimalist movie poster style of the 1960’s when directors like Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Enzo G. Castellari were revered as cinematic gods to western fans and young movie geeks like Tarantino who were just itching for the sweaty, bloody thrills they a spaghetti western could deliver without fail.

Looks like the wrong Mexican is about to fucked with again.

It was nearly two years ago when fiercely independent filmmaker Robert Rodriguez turned his fake Grindhouse trailer Machete into a full-blown feature film top-loaded with gratuitous female nudity, gleefully gory comic book action, and an absurd all-star cast including Robert DeNiro, Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, and Cheech Marin. The entire concept of Machete was built around legendary tough guy character actor Danny Trejo, who reprised the title role that has elevated him to the status of an action icon in Rodriguez’s 2010 B-movie epic that grossed $44 million globally from a $10.5 million budget and did excellent business on DVD and Blu-ray.

Special effects make-up wizard Greg Nicotero (the “N” in KNB EFX) has become a close collaborator of writer-director Quentin Tarantino after working his FX magic on many of the iconoclastic filmmaker’s best known works including Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds.

Nicotero spoke with MTV about working with Tarantino on the director’s latest film, Django Unchained, recently during a Television Critics Association event for AMC’s The Walking Dead, on which he serves as effects supervisor and co-executive producer. You can watch a video of Nicotero’s comments here below.

One of the many things that director Quentin Tarantino is known for is putting together great casts for his movies; even for some of the smaller characters he has, such as Mike Myers in Inglourious Basterds for example. It sounded strange when first reported, but worked out great in the final product.

Perhaps not quite as strange as that particular casting, it’s being reported that Tarantino has chosen Sacha Baron Cohen for a small role in his upcoming movie, Django Unchained.