Inglourious Basterds Reviews

Inglourious is slow, dumb -- and in a first for QT in his cinema savant career -- incompetent.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

They're inventing a new junk-food product line for Inglourious Basterds - the White Elephant Supreme.

Full Review

The film is by no means terrible but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long
 stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized 
characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.

Why is Basterds such a colossal disappointment? It's mostly because Tarantino indulges all of his worst impulses as a filmmaker and ignores what he does best.

| Original Score: 2/5

Simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Some of it is good; much of it is preposterous. In trying to meld comedy and tragedy it entertains fitfully and requires more patience than most Tarantino films do.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

It's a film that's only interested in film, a masterclass in gorgeously-constructed self-pastiche. Tarantino desperately needs an editor willing to trim his indulgences.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

'Subtle' is not a word in Tarantino's lexicon. At the film's heart is a fatal attempt to conflate fact with fiction and a celebration of vengeance that's misplaced and embarrassing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Tarantino's scenes go on and on because he's in love with the sound of his character talking. This gets especially maddening in Inglorious Basterds because much of the dialogue is in German, so the words are three times as long.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

The movie's tone is dangerously close to triumphant, without the necessary satire or feeling to keep it from being smug and potentially offensive.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Tonally schizoid and rife with anachronisms (a David Bowie song on the sound track, out-of-era vernacular), Tarantino's Third Reich folly is utterly exasperating.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

It's these fine sequences that can make you truly regret Tarantino's snarky, in-joke impulses, not to mention his arrogant -- perhaps even dangerous -- lack of concern with the story's moral dimensions.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

All the trademark Tarantino flourishes are here -- the joyous splaying of gore; the self-referential dialogue; the artful artificiality and the juxtaposition of humor and violence -- but they don't add up to much.

Tarantino is at times like a flamboyant, egomaniacal orchestra conductor, gesticulating wildly and turning to the audience to make sure we know that the show's about him.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10

As is often the case with Tarantino's post-1990's output, great scenes are adrift in an undisciplined sea of ugly-spirited, juvenile self-indulgence.

Full Review

Its biggest flaw, though, for those who care about such things, may be its moral attitude. That might seem a stodgy thing to bring up in the context of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it takes such center stage that it needs to be examined.

Full Review

The pop-art auteur's least-focused film to date, a rambling wreck of shrewd ideas and cinematic influences that never interlock into their own identifiable movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

The final impression of the movie - that it's crass, juvenile and profoundly distasteful - overrides its more enjoyable moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Intermittently-inspired World War II epic ... the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.

Full Review

Quentin Tarantino has finally made a movie that means something, though I think that's happened entirely by accident...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Full Review