Tarantino's Top Three

Rating: 9/10 (2 August 2019)

If you love Quentin Tarantino's style, Inglorious Basterds is going to be an absolute treat for you. It's widely considered by many, even Tarantino himself, to be his "masterpiece" or his best since Pulp Fiction, and it is absolutely, undoubtedly worthy of such praise.
The dialogue here is arguably sharper than it has ever been - even Pulp Fiction has a couple minutes worth of conversation within it that aren't particularly entertaining, as only one scene in this film failed to completely hold my interest, and that is quite possibly the shortest scene in here! Every other moment of IB manages to completely hook you and draw you into the world, whether it's the vibrant Brad Pitt making you laugh, or the scene stealer Christoff Waltz making you anxious, with Tarantino crafting some of his most memorable characters and using dialogue in this film to fuel the suspense, making conversations that go on for 20 or 30 minutes worth of screen time a never-ending spiral of anxiety that reaches a satisfying peak each time.
The performances and writing are even more worthy of applause considering a great deal of the movie is spoken in another language, an element of war that other directors choose to ignore, but which Tarantino uses as a tool for suspenseful storytelling and sequences, fixing an issue which we didn't really know we had as an audience. As Tarantino so eloquently put it, other films "have this opportunity for a great scene, but you're pissing it away by having German be English".
It also offers a great deal of memorable Tarantino moments, including a tense 20 minute opening, a baseball bat, quite possibly the longest bar scene known to man, and an ending that doesn't limit itself with what really happened throughout history.
As a result, while Pulp Fiction may be a more iconic and witty flick, IB is the Tarantino film I think about most, from the characters, to the conversations, to the ending, to the direction, if you weren't already obsessed with Tarantino, Inglorious Basterds has a good shot at changing that.