Inglourious Basterds
Weinstein Company, The | Release Date: August 21, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 36 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
9
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
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. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
A big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s (Tarantino) the real thing, a director of quixotic delights. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Basterds isn't so revolutionary or so finely crafted as "Pulp Fiction" was, but it crackles with the same energy and imagination and chutzpah. Read full review
100
TimeRichard Corliss
It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
It's not enough to say that Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's best movie. It's the first movie of his artistic maturity, the film his talent has been promising for more than 15 years. Read full review
90
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe Williams
With its exploded notions of heroism, torture-rack dramatics and kamikaze gusto, it's a fiendishly entertaining flick. Read full review
88
New York PostLou Lumenick
May be the most fun you'll have at the movies this summer. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Tarantino exercises both his obsession with vengeance and his fascination with the movies. Read full review
80
VarietyTodd McCarthy
A violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Read full review
80
EmpireChris Hewitt (1)
With a confidence typical of its director, the last line of Inglourious Basterds is, "This might just be my masterpiece." While that may not be true, this is an often dazzling movie that sees QT back on exhilarating form. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
A fairy tale about the infinite power of film, it boasts all his swaggering trademarks: rapid-fire dialogue, gleeful violence, endless cultural references. But it's the sharp-eyed deliberation that makes the greatest impact. Read full review
80
Time OutKeith Uhlich
Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
In Tarantino's besotted historical reverie, real-life villains Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are played as grotesque jokes. The Basterds are played as exaggeratedly tough Jews. The women are femmes fatales.? Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
For anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
It's a film with many strengths, but it's not a knockout. And that's Tarantino's own fault, though not in the first way you might imagine. Read full review
70
Film ThreatNick Antosca
The biggest, weirdest, ugliest cartoon in Inglourious Basterds is Aldo Raine, the Nazi-killing American Lieutenant played by Brad Pitt. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Tarantino has already caught some flack for daring to use the Holocaust as material for another of his bloody live-action cartoons, but of course the generation that experienced it for real has mostly faded away. In that sense Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as "Easy Rider" was in its day. Read full review
70
SlateDana Stevens
Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglorious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
For all its stylistic flourishes and interlocking storylines, Inglourious Basterds is, at its bullet-riddled core, a bloody good war movie, twisting and twisted and full of wordy shrapnel but no less kickass for it. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
its moments of greatness--and there are more than a couple--feel weirdly disconnected, stuck in a movie that doesn’t know how to put them together, or find a good way to move from one to the next. Read full review
67
NPRScott Tobias
The film on the whole feels unusually labored and conventional by Tarantino standards. Reducing World War II to juvenilia isn't the problem; the problem is that juvenilia needs to pop. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
No one else in Inglourious Basterds comes close to Landa for sheer charisma. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
The result is a Jewish “Death Wish,” to borrow Pauline Kael’s description of “Marathon Man,” amped up to epoch-changing proportions, made by a gentile writer-director with an unlimited appetite for celluloid, right down to its highly flammable properties. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy Burr
A manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- 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. Read full review
60
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Unwieldy, long-winded, self-indulgently nutso and, in places, very, very boring. It also caps off its two-and-a-half-hour run time with an extended finale – partially orchestrated to David Bowie's "Cat People" theme song, no less – that I could watch again and again with pleasure Read full review
50
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Let's start with this certainty: No one but Quentin Tarantino could possibly have made Inglourious Basterds . Now add another: No one but his most ardent fans will be entirely glad that Quentin Tarantino did make Inglourious Basterds . Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
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. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoanne Kaufman
Nothing about the emotionally unmoored Inglourious Basterds adds up. Whether it's parody, farce or a fever dream is anyone's guess. Read full review
50
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt. Read full review
50
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. 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. Read full review
38
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good. Read full review
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