Critics Find Basterds Glorious

Not every critic loves Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but many do, and they really love it. Here’s what they’re saying.

• It’s not just Tarantino’s best movie, “It's the first movie of his artistic maturity,” writes Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle. It takes the cinematic clichés that have made us dull to World War II and blows them up. The result is an “exhilarating release, but it’s also a deeply sad film.”

• Tarantino’s made a “big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others, and demonstrate once again that he’s the real thing,” writes Roger Ebert.
• But Slate’s Dana Stevens wasn’t as impressed. “Tarantino's sheer oblivious American buffoonery accounts for this movie's raw pop power," Stevens writes, "and for the aftertaste of shame and nausea it leaves behind.” Still, “Tarantino is director enough to elicit cinematic wows even at his most reprehensible.”

(More Inglourious Basterds stories.)