Here is a look at what film critics around the country said about the film:
Luke Y. Thompson
E! Online
"Though the misleading marketing would have you believe it's an action flick about Brad Pitt kicking Kraut keisters from here to eternity, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist take on World War II actually unfolds more as a series of suspense-laden conversations. And he's really, really good at doing them."
Randy Myers
San Jose Mercury News
"This is Tarantino country we're visiting, where the lengthy conversations crackle, the extreme violence is shocking and the audacious plot is multi-pronged.
"Basterds" ranks high on the Tarantino meter, slightly above "Kill Bill: Volume 2" and just below the underrated "Jackie Brown." It's recklessly entertaining, an extravaganza for cinemaniacs in which Nazis get their comeuppance and Tarantino blowtorches World War II history.
Although it falters slightly toward the end, nearly all of the movie is so rich and engaging that you'll happily present Tarantino with a hall pass for a climax that lacks the killer punch you would expect."
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
"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. The picture contains all the things his fans like about Tarantino -- the wit, the audacity, the sudden violence -- but this movie's emotional core and bigness of spirit are new."
Ann Hornaday
Washington Post
"With the eagerly anticipated "Inglourious Basterds," Tarantino manages to simultaneously surprise and revert to predictable form. The surprise lies in his choice of period and subject matter. Set in France during World War II, "Inglourious Basterds" tells the fictional story of a special squad of American Jews whose mission to kill and capture German soldiers was uniquely practical and symbolic. But as rich as the subject matter is in both action and metaphor, in Tarantino's hands it becomes mere scaffolding for his chief preoccupation, which is the movies.
"From the admittedly breathtaking opening sequence, which in its meticulous staging, pacing and acting pays loving homage to the work of Sergio Leone, to the Grand Guignol of a climax set in a Paris cinema, 'Inglourious Basterds' 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.
"To the degree that viewers share Tarantino's obsessions -- with cinema, music and bloody, ritualized violence -- they will enjoy "Inglourious Basterds," which undoubtedly possesses its share of grace notes. Finest by far is the German actor Christoph Waltz, who in a revelatory performance plays the German colonel and legendary 'Jew hunter' Hans Landa. Waltz appears in that fabulous opening sequence, confronting a French dairy farmer whom he suspects of harboring a fugitive Jewish family. As he drinks a glass of the farmer's fresh milk, Waltz's Landa takes his place among the pantheon of great film villains, the personification of smiling evil and playful, menacing politesse.
Dana Stevens
Slate.com
"Like Spielberg, Tarantino is director enough to elicit cinematic wows even at his most reprehensible. Though 'Basterds' is overlong and undisciplined, it contains individual set pieces -- that opening encounter in the French farmhouse and a later scene in which the Basterds go undercover as German officers in the basement of a tavern -- that are near-perfect examples of taut, suspenseful moviemaking."
Jay Stone
Vancouver Sun
"Quentin Tarantino is a volcano of film history, a master not so much of words as of dialogue. His Second World War film, Inglourious Basterds, gives life to notions that Tarantino has derived from the movies: like most of his work, it is partly a thing of its own and partly an homage to our cinematic memory. The very typo of the title hints at his audacity.
"This is somewhat dangerous given the context -- Nazis vs. Jews in the Second World War -- but like most of Tarantino's work, Inglourious Basterds isn't as concerned with the reality of say, murder, as it is with the style of it, and its filmic antecedents."
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
"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"... The three main characters "are seen with that Tarantino knack of taking a character and making it a Character, definitive, larger than life, approaching satire in its intensity but not -- quite -- going that far. Let's say they feel bigger than most of the people we meet in movies."
David Denby
The New Yorker
"Very little in ‘Basterds' is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn't quite farce, either. It's lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism. In the middle of this crazy narrative, Tarantino pauses to pay his respects, like an unctuous film professor, to the immortals of German cinema ... ‘Inglourious Basterds' is not boring, but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive-a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously."
Chris Hewitt
Empire
"As enjoyably idiosyncratic as the spelling of its title would suggest, it's a film that takes devilish delight in feinting left when it looks like it might go right. Characters are introduced, pomped and circumstanced, and then almost glibly despatched; the Basterds themselves barely appear, while Brad Pitt, the ostensible lead, shows up for only three of the movie's five chapters and doesn't fire a single shot in anger; while history is adhered to with all the accuracy of an MP's expenses claim."
Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
"Despite nods to notions like Jewish revenge and the power of cinema, the director has paid so much attention to the film's peripherals he has neglected to provide a center worth embracing. You can raise B pictures to A picture status, as Tarantino has made a career out of doing, but giving them A picture value is not so easily done."
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
"Few young-to-middle-aged American filmmakers have the nerd-centric depth of movie knowledge and technique that Tarantino brings to his high-flying projects, and fewer still have the confidence to simultaneously glorify and deconstruct genre as he can, whether the genre is blaxploitation, Hong Kong action, '70s grindhouse fare, or, in this case, war movies and '40s noir. But Tarantino's gleefully assembled spectacles are inextricable from his frustrating emotional limitations: Everything is a game."
Lou Lumenick
New York Post
"Despite overlength, I think this is Tarantino's best film since 'Pulp Fiction,' though his legion of detractors will likely not appreciate the aging enfant terrible drastically rewriting history at a Paris movie premiere, with help from a pair of femmes who put explosive new meaning in the word fatale."
