Inglourious BasterdsMovie Reviews

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Avg. Critic Score: 69 out of 100 Generally favorable reviews Metascore^® based on all critic reviews

Information for Parents:

not for kids

Read Common Sense Media review

Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

100

San Francisco Chronicle | Mick LaSalle
It's not enough to say that Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's best movie. It's the first movie of his artistic maturity, the film his talent has been promising for more than 15 years. Read full review
100

Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert
A big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he's (Tarantino) the real thing, a director of quixotic delights. Read full review
88

USA Today | Claudia Puig
Tarantino exercises both his obsession with vengeance and his fascination with the movies. Read full review
80

Variety | Todd McCarthy
A violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Read full review
75

Rolling Stone | Peter Travers
For anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it. Read full review
75

Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum
In Tarantino's besotted historical reverie, real-life villains Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are played as grotesque jokes. The Basterds are played as exaggeratedly tough Jews. The women are femmes fatales.? Read full review
60

The Hollywood Reporter | Kirk Honeycutt
The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing. Read full review
50

Washington Post | Ann Hornaday
Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything. Read full review
50

The New York Times | Manohla Dargis
Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt. Read full review
50

Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan
Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees. Read full review

Metacritic link View more reviews for Inglourious Basterds on Metacritic

Information for Parents

Common Sense Media says not for kids Tarantino's World War II epic is both bloody and talky.

What Parents Need to Know Parents need to know that, like all of director Quentin Tarantino's work, while this World War II adventure starring Brad Pitt is full of food for thought, it's also brutally violent, bloody, and full of harsh language. Expect cringe-inducing beatings, shootings, and more, plus a non-stop barrage of words like "f--k" and "s--t," constant smoking, and plenty of drinking. The film also takes lots of liberties with history and is very talky -- meaning that teens who watch might alternate between being bored to death and shocked by the gory parts.

Families can talk about the movie's violence. What's the impact of the brutal scenes? Does it make the violence feel surreal or more honest and authentic?
Are there limits on what soliders will and won't (or can and can't) do in the heat of the moment during wartime? Do soliders who participate in a genocide like that of the Nazis against the Jews deserve any mercy?
What does the movie say about the role of filmmaking, press/public relations, and storytelling as part of war? What role does film have in wartime? How can it be manipulated to meet those ends?

The good stuff

Positive messages: Extensive discussion (and depiction) of the pursuit of vengeance and of the role that rumor and fear play in psychological warfare. The film's discussion of the Nazis' extermination of Jews is glossed over in the context of a rock-'em, sock-'em action film.
Positive role models: The movie's characters are either coldly efficient killing machines or hot-headed murderers ... with a few decent people along the way to suffer at the hands of said killers and murderers.

What to watch for

Violence: Strong, brutal, bloody violence throughought, including both war violence (gunfights, shootings, and more) and brutal close-quarters encounters (deliberate mutilation with knives, throat-slashings, scalping). A man is beaten to death with a baseball bat on camera. A woman is shot at point-blank range. A German officer is shown being obliterated by machine-gun fire, bullets pulverizing his body and face into a bloody mass. A man drives his finger into a woman's bullet wound to elicit cooperation and information. Soldiers and civilians are machine-gunned; others die in a house-fire.
Sex: A few seconds of clothed sexual activity are shown for comedic effect, with no nakedness; some suggestive dialogue.
Language: Constant swearing and strong language, including "f--k," "motherf--ker," "s--t," "goddammit," "bastards," "ass," "damn," "hell," and more. "Jew," Nazi," "Apachem," and "Negro" are all used, both as descriptive phrases and as insults.
Consumerism: Some mentions of brands like Coca-Cola.
Drinking, drugs and smoking: Characters drink beer, wine, champagne, and hard liquor, sometimes to excess. Characters also smoke cigarettes extensively (accurate for the era), use snuff, and smoke pipes. The medical use of morphine is discussed.

Common Sense Media An independent nonprofit dedicated to providing families the information they need to help kids thrive in a world of media and technology. © Common Sense Media Inc. 2010. All rights reserved.