Despite the excessive runtime (a few minutes shy off 2.5 hours) there lingers a strange feeling that everything has been rushed up in a way.

Rating: 7/10 (20 September 2009)

This is quite a long film. The premise and plot are both simple and straightforward. Save Waltz (Landa), there is nothing at all worth mentioning when it comes to performance, except perhaps Laurent (Shosanna) in a few of her scenes, especially the restaurant confrontation with Standartenführer Landa where she managed to form a living driving force only with her eyes and facial expressions.
Pitt (Raine) kept a cowboy accent and an annoying Marlon Brando imitation to the bitter end. Brühl (Zoller) played the classic méchant chevalier with an extra layer of innocence up to his last scene.
Music is nostalgic with many homage pieces, a characteristic of Tarantino's work.
At least two stand-off's occur to satisfy the director's passion for pasta; the first one is a three-way (Chapter Four) and the second one is a hit-miss-hit (Chapter Five.) Now I have to watch the film one more time when it goes on DVD to form an opinion on the cinematography and décor work. However, as far as it goes for a first watch, I cannot but fail to find any possibility for this title to achieve any honours (except for Christoph Waltz)-- there is almost no memorable pieces in the dialogue, and the performance of many actors sealed the film's fate, especially the flat performance of Pitt-Brando and the secondary high-ranking characters, notably Gruth (Goebbles) Wuttke (Hitler.) The other Germans did put up a not-so-bad performance though.
For a final verdict: An extremely boring, very Tarantino 'loan-y' film, with emphasis on tics, accents and speech patterns over any intelligent or comprehensible dialogue. Lukewarm, straightforward flat writing which favours in-scene slow tension-building over the overall progress of the story, again in a usual Tarantino style. The assassination scene (Chapter Five) and its build-ups turned out quite nicely though, in a genre-blending manner.
3 out of 6 (for Waltz' and some of Laurent's performances and the assassination scenes. The remaining 4 points to the 10 mark are reserved for cinematography.)