Inglourious Basterds Reviews
Top Critic
Like a bat to the head, it's not too subtle, but you can't help but watch.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Quentin Tarantino seems to be hanging on to a lost world of moviemaking. He may be nuts. But he's a nut who cares.
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.
Tarantino's vigorously accomplished 'Inglourious Basterds'
Landa is such a wily and despicable concoction that, in movie terms, he's almost impossible not to like. And therein lies part of my problem with this movie.
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| Original Score: B-
I'm tempted to say Tarantino has done it again, but I doubt anyone has ever done anything like his dazzlingly original World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Will Basterds polarize audiences? That's a given. But for anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
The picture contains all the things his fans like about Tarantino -- the wit, the audacity, the sudden violence -- but this movie's emotional core and bigness of spirit are new.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
War reduced to pop entertainment should at least be easy to swallow, but this stuff keeps getting stuck in our craw. The trash that Tarantino used to elevate he now imitates.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Tarantino's signature nastiness and his juvenile delight in shocking the audience undercut the movie's larger purpose.
Scenes like the showdown in the tavern and the movie-premiere finale are as imaginative, energetic and, in their own weird, brutal way, beautiful as cinema gets.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
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.
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
For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.
One of the best performances of the decade in one of the most entertaining movies of the year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
I don't know if I've ever seen a revenge fantasy so willfully messed up, sometimes offensively so, that still manages to be worthwhile for whole sections of its 2 1/2 hours. The opening is as good a sequence as Tarantino has ever created.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The true moral universe in which the film unfolds is that of the spaghetti westerns...: a world in which the strong are above the law and the way to tell the good guys from the bad guys is not by their acts but by the kind of hats they wear.
Inglorious Basterds is an entertainment but an uneasy one; it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
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
Quentin Tarantino's extremely witty revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds may be the most fun you'll have at the movies this summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
When a man makes a movie this good, you can forgive him the occasional indulgence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Basterds is not great Tarantino but it's solidly good Tarantino, and that's sweet news for his fans.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Tarantino's wartime fantasies may leave history in the dust, but his movie is a surprisingly satisfying contribution to movies about the Holocaust.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
These Basterds blend into a much richer story, a hugely entertaining one with stars you don't immediately see shining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Many Tarantino movies are female revenge fantasies, in which strong women plot the deaths of men who wronged them. In Shosanna and Bridget, the writer-director has fashioned two of his steeliest, most principled femmes fatales.
Tarantino is the most fearlessly inventive filmmaker alive -- but we knew that. And while Inglourious Basterds is never anything less than ridiculously entertaining, it's nothing Tarantino hasn't done before.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Inglourious Basterds transcends the war genre to become its own kind of unique picture: A bloody blast of pure movie bliss.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as Easy Rider was in its day.
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he's the real thing, a director of quixotic delights.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Tarantino crams enough movie-loving passion into the film to keep you not just entertained but occasionally riveted. Above all else, it's a really enjoyable ride.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie since Pulp Fiction. He has also made what could arguably be considered the most audacious World War II movie of all-time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Detractors and proponents alike will see what they want to see in this two-and-a-half-hour World War II fable, which hits all the beats of a retribution-laden genre piece without ever entirely satiating character or audience bloodlust.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Inglourious is slow, dumb -- and in a first for QT in his cinema savant career -- incompetent.
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| Original Score: 1/5
World War II was more serious, complex and horrifying than all this comic embellishment, but if I sound critical, I apologize in advance. I had a helluva time watching Inglourious Basterds.
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment -- rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.
If only Quentin Tarantino the director weren't so completely in love with Quentin Tarantino the writer, Inglourious Basterds might have been a great movie rather than just a good movie with moments of greatness.
The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it's all of a piece.
Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive-a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously.
This is a seriously provocative film.
Superbly acted and well constructed, each scene is paced to a chaotic climatic frenzy.
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz triumphs, heroically, over Tarantino's brash, cine-drunk tall tale.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.
'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
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.
