Inglourious Basterds | Telescope Film
Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds

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  • Germany,
  • United States
  • 2009
  • · 153m

Director Quentin Tarantino
Cast Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger
Genre Drama, Action, Thriller, War

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.

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What are users saying?

Eddie Godino

Inglorious Basterds is, in true Tarantino fashion, equal parts hilarious, violent, and suspenseful from start to finish. The cast is absolutely phenomenal, down to the smallest part, and the way in which the separate plot-lines weave around each other until they finally coalesce at the end is masterful storytelling. Having the titular Basterds be a band of Jewish soldiers taking the fight to the Nazis' doorstep is an awesome reversal of the way Jewish people are usually portrayed in WWII films, and the revisionist history angle Tarantino takes at the end fits perfectly with the tone of the movie. If you're a fan of war movies and suspenseful storytelling in general, Inglorious Basterds should be next on your watchlist.

Asia Cureton

This film is truly one of Tarantino's bests. Funny, violent, and entertaining. I find myself constantly going back to this film. Tarantino manages to both highlight the stupidity of the Nazi ideology and the dangers of fascism without being too heavy handed or minimizing its importance. Despite the film's long runtime, I felt pulled in from start to finish. Tarantino really knows how to create tense scenes that manage to make you super anxious. I was on the edge of my seat multiple times throughout the film. Great performances, thrilling action scenes, and an even better score.

What are critics saying?

100

ReelViews by James 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.

100

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger 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.

100

Miami Herald by René Rodríguez

Basterds isn't so revolutionary or so finely crafted as "Pulp Fiction" was, but it crackles with the same energy and imagination and chutzpah.

100

Time by Richard 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.

100

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick 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.

90

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.

88

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

With its exploded notions of heroism, torture-rack dramatics and kamikaze gusto, it's a fiendishly entertaining flick.

88

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

May be the most fun you'll have at the movies this summer.

88

USA Today by Claudia Puig

Tarantino exercises both his obsession with vengeance and his fascination with the movies.

80

New York Magazine (Vulture) by 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.

80

Empire by Chris 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.

80

Variety by Todd 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.

75

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa 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.?

70

Film Threat

The biggest, weirdest, ugliest cartoon in Inglourious Basterds is Aldo Raine, the Nazi-killing American Lieutenant played by Brad Pitt.

60

The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk 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.

50

The New Yorker by David Denby

Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive.