Inglourious Basterds
Academy Award × 1
Rent/Purchase
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
What critics thought
Tarantino's WWII revenge fantasy divided critics sharply on release — widely seen as an exhilarating formal exercise with a magnetic villain in Hans Landa, but contested on whether its cinephile cleverness and revisionist bloodletting add up to anything morally or emotionally meaningful. Audiences and retrospective polls have warmed to it considerably more than the initial critical spread suggested.
“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.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“Inglourious Basterds is great fun to watch, but the movie isn't entirely engaging ... You don't jump into the world of the film in a participatory way; you watch it from a distance, appreciating the references and the masterful mise en scène.”
Anne Thompson·IndieWire
“The film is skillfully made, but it's too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. ... Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”
David Denby·The New Yorker
“A film that didn't even entertain me past its opening sequence, and that profoundly bored me during the endlessly protracted build-up to a cellar shoot-out, it also gave me the sort of malaise that made me wonder periodically what it was (and is) about the film that seems morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that.”
jonathanrosenbaum.net
“an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichaean world where we needn't worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat”
Tablet
Genres
Adventure, Drama, War
Cast & Crew
DirectorQuentin Tarantino
StarringBrad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender
Inglourious Basterds
Academy Award × 1
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
What critics thought
Tarantino's WWII revenge fantasy divided critics sharply on release — widely seen as an exhilarating formal exercise with a magnetic villain in Hans Landa, but contested on whether its cinephile cleverness and revisionist bloodletting add up to anything morally or emotionally meaningful. Audiences and retrospective polls have warmed to it considerably more than the initial critical spread suggested.
“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.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“Inglourious Basterds is great fun to watch, but the movie isn't entirely engaging ... You don't jump into the world of the film in a participatory way; you watch it from a distance, appreciating the references and the masterful mise en scène.”
Anne Thompson·IndieWire
“The film is skillfully made, but it's too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. ... Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”
David Denby·The New Yorker
“A film that didn't even entertain me past its opening sequence, and that profoundly bored me during the endlessly protracted build-up to a cellar shoot-out, it also gave me the sort of malaise that made me wonder periodically what it was (and is) about the film that seems morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that.”
jonathanrosenbaum.net
“an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichaean world where we needn't worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat”
Tablet
Genres
Adventure, Drama, War
Cast & Crew
DirectorQuentin Tarantino
StarringBrad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender
Rent/Purchase