Quartile rating: 9/10 · 4 ratings
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.
Inglourious Basterds is a masterclass in tension-building dialogue and genre subversion, with Tarantino's revisionist WWII fantasy delivering career-best performances from Christoph Waltz and a superb ensemble. The cinematography is lush and precise, each chapter framed with deliberate style. Its novelty is exceptional — a gleefully anachronistic, pulpy deconstruction of war cinema with a singular voice. The ending, while audacious and cathartic in its wish-fulfillment, is the one element that divides audiences and feels slightly indulgent even by Tarantino's own maximalist standards, making it the least fully realized aspect of an otherwise outstanding film.