One Paragraph Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

Two hundred and sixty-second film: Inglourious Basterds, a fiction-based-loosely-on-fact movie that has Nazi-killing as its foreplay, Hitler-killing as its climax, and an astounding amount of tension in between. Brad Pitt plays an emotionless Southerner so it’s hard to tell if he does a good job or not, and Christoph Waltz plays a milk-drinking, sadistic, polite Nazi and is one of the greatest and most uncomfortable things on film. This has all the good Tarantino bits (tension, dialogue, humour, slow-build, violence) without too many of the bad Tarantino bits (overly bloated script, overly terrible cameo, overly fetishistic footage of feet), and it’s hard not to let loose a triumphant yawp during the big bits. It feels genuinely like a 1940s-style adventure story and only scrapes characters from history, not storyline, to take well-appreciated shortcuts in telling us how to feel about them. I hate having to check how to spell it every single time, but I love watching it. Four and three-quarter menacing glasses of milk out of five.