That's a bingo

Rating: 8/10 (30 August 2014)

Quentin Tarantino is known for his abundant use of violence and profanities, but his subversiveness runs a lot deeper than that. Consider Inglourious Basterds, his first war movie, a choral story with intertwining plot lines set in Nazi-occupied France during WWII.
It's amazing how Tarantino treats conversations like set-pieces: with his great ear for vivid dialogues he crafts magnificently tense scenes of verbal sparring, the best involving British officer Fassbender and his men, all disguised as Nazis, trapped in an increasingly dangerous discussion with a clingy Gestapo Major. See how Basterds plays with different languages - many conversations take place in (subtitled) German and French, with cunning manipulator Landa (Christoph Waltz, stealing the movie with his affably villainous performance), a skilled polyglot, ably switching between them.
In fact, the only battle scenes in Basterds occur in the propaganda movie-within-the-movie Nation's Pride, a stream of gruesome killings witnessed by an enthusiastic movie theater full of Nazis - Tarantino takes a jab at the audience' expectations, much like Joss Whedon would do a few years later in the horror genre with The Cabin in the Woods.
Tarantino also draws a clear parallel between brutalities committed for the sake of the good cause and those perpetrated by villains. Consider how the audience shares the point of view of fallen Germans savagely branded by the Basterds, or how the appearance of the "Bear Jew" is akin to that of a serial killer in a slasher movie, emerging from a dark cave preceded by the ominous thuds of his baseball bat. This is the spiritual successor of Robert Aldrich's queasily brilliant The Dirty Dozen.
Performances are fine, with the already mentioned Waltz, Pitt in one of his canny turns proving he is a much better character actor than conventional romantic lead, plus Fassbender, Kruger and Mélanie Laurent in a star-making turn as the movie's real protagonist.
7,5/10