This just might be Tarantino's masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (20 March 2012)

"I think this just might be my masterpiece", Brad Pitt says near the end of Inglourious Basterds. The line might be a bit blunt, but it is quite clear that this is what Quentin Tarantino aimed for with his one-of-a-kind revisionist World War II spaghetti western of sorts.
One element that runs through all of the chapters is the incredible tension that Tarantino squeezes out of his drawn out scenes. Many of them are based on fear of revelation or information asymmetry. Take, for instance, the brilliant opening scene where a dairy farmer is interrogated by Hans Landa about whether or not he is hiding Jews at the farm. After a while, the camera slowly descends to the basement where a family is hiding – a terrific example of trading the element of surprise for the element of suspense. Another one is where the woman (Shosanna Dreyfus) who managed to survive from that scene is meeting Landa again. A third example is the marvellous basement scene in which a group of British and American officers disguised as Germans are forced to play a tense card game with a real German officer. This is also one of the (rather few) scenes were all that tension is released in a violent climax.
The film has a great cast overall, but most of the praise has rightly been given to Christoph Waltz as the cunning and almost menacingly polite colonel Hans Landa. I guess it can be equally attributed to Tarantino's writing; in almost every scene Landa seems to have an advantage over his opponent. One such hilarious instance is when he meets Brad Pitt et al. who are disguised as Italians, and it turns out that he speaks perfect Italian; another is when he offers Shosanna an ominous glass of milk.
All in all, Inglourious Basterds is a wonderful condensation (actually, maybe not so much a condensation as an expansion) of the things we have come to associate with Tarantino. The film is full of great music, long, dialogue-heavy takes and is filled to the brim with movie references (Pabst is namedropped quite a few times). I am not sure if it actually is his masterpiece, but it is entertaining enough for me to want to see it over and over again.