Inglourious Basterds Review

Inglourious Basterds opens with twenty minutes of a man drinking milk at a farmhouse table, and it is the most suspenseful sequence Quentin Tarantino has ever written. That scene is the whole film's method: conversation as siege warfare, where language itself, French, German, English, Italian badly attempted, is the weapon and the tell. Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa is a once-a-generation villain, a detective-shaped monster who treats genocide as a logic puzzle and charm as procedure; the performance won every award available and deserved more.

The basement tavern chapter escalates a card game into a bloodbath over a three-fingered gesture, the best single scene of Tarantino's career. Mélanie Laurent's Shoshanna gives the revenge plot its soul, and her cinema-fire finale, faces of the dead laughing in smoke, lets film literally destroy fascism, the medium avenging itself. Brad Pitt's cartoon Tennessee accent is the film's pressure valve, comedy calibrated against dread.

The Basterds themselves are thinly sketched, more premise than platoon, which is the single visible economy. As structure, five chapters converging on one burning theater, and as writing, it is Tarantino's most complete film.