Name : Tom Maurstad / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Scenes like the showdown in the tavern and the movie-premiere finale are as imaginative, energetic and, in their own weird, brutal way, beautiful as cinema gets.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie since Pulp Fiction. He has also made what could arguably be considered the most audacious World War II movie of all-time.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he's the real thing, a director of quixotic delights.

Name : Jonathan F. Richards / Alias : Film.com
Its biggest flaw, though, for those who care about such things, may be its moral attitude. That might seem a stodgy thing to bring up in the context of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it takes such center stage that it needs to be examined.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Landa is such a wily and despicable concoction that, in movie terms, he's almost impossible not to like. And therein lies part of my problem with this movie.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Salon.com
Quentin Tarantino seems to be hanging on to a lost world of moviemaking. He may be nuts. But he's a nut who cares.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
The secret sauce of this delicious romp is the joy of hanging out with a delightfully unruly rebel with a paintbrush.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
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.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
'Subtle' is not a word in Tarantino's lexicon. At the film's heart is a fatal attempt to conflate fact with fiction and a celebration of vengeance that's misplaced and embarrassing.

Name : Ben Mankiewicz / Alias : At the Movies
This is a seriously provocative film.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it's all of a piece.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Tarantino is the most fearlessly inventive filmmaker alive - but we knew that. And while Inglourious Basterds is never anything less than ridiculously entertaining, it's nothing Tarantino hasn't done before.

Name : Tomris Laffly / Alias : Time Out
Breezy and vivid, Art Bastard ultimately delivers the person: criminally underrated yet still principled and generous.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Cenedella is rough around the edges, yet he remains fascinating.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
The picture contains all the things his fans like about Tarantino - the wit, the audacity, the sudden violence - but this movie's emotional core and bigness of spirit are new.

Name : Sheila O'Malley / Alias : RogerEbert.com
Engaging and thought-provoking .

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as Easy Rider was in its day.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The outcome is gory and glorious.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Basterds is not great Tarantino but it's solidly good Tarantino, and that's sweet news for his fans.

Name : Ben Lyons / Alias : At the Movies
Superbly acted and well constructed, each scene is paced to a chaotic climatic frenzy.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
I'm tempted to say Tarantino has done it again, but I doubt anyone has ever done anything like his dazzlingly original World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
One of the best performances of the decade in one of the most entertaining movies of the year.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Inglourious Basterds transcends the war genre to become its own kind of unique picture: A bloody blast of pure movie bliss.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It's these fine sequences that can make you truly regret Tarantino's snarky, in-joke impulses, not to mention his arrogant - perhaps even dangerous - lack of concern with the story's moral dimensions.

Name : Frank Scheck / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Art Bastard shines brightest not as a biographical portrait - an aim in which it succeeds only sporadically - but rather as a showcase for the highly imaginative and thoughtful works by the now 76-year-old, too-little-known painter.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Tarantino crams enough movie-loving passion into the film to keep you not just entertained but occasionally riveted. Above all else, it's a really enjoyable ride.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Quentin Tarantino's extremely witty revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds may be the most fun you'll have at the movies this summer.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
World War II was more serious, complex and horrifying than all this comic embellishment, but if I sound critical, I apologize in advance. I had a helluva time watching Inglourious Basterds.

Name : Tom Charity / Alias : CNN.com
Waltz will be unknown to most American audiences - he was certainly unknown to me - but he's nothing less than sensational as the silky, polyglot SS officer charged by the Fuhrer to root out the remaining Jews in France.

Name : Bob Mondello / Alias : NPR
'Art Bastard' is a film about a man who has tilted - and continues to tilt - at the art-world equivalent of Don Quixote's windmills.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
Like a bat to the head, it's not too subtle, but you can't help but watch.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
When a man makes a movie this good, you can forgive him the occasional indulgence.

Name : David Denby / Alias : New Yorker
Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive-a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
Many Tarantino movies are female revenge fantasies, in which strong women plot the deaths of men who wronged them. In Shosanna and Bridget, the writer-director has fashioned two of his steeliest, most principled femmes fatales.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
I don't know if I've ever seen a revenge fantasy so willfully messed up, sometimes offensively so, that still manages to be worthwhile for whole sections of its 2 1/2 hours. The opening is as good a sequence as Tarantino has ever created.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Cenedella may never become a household name, but "Art Bastard" argues persuasively that fame is overrated.

Name : Joanne Kaufman / Alias : Wall Street Journal
All the trademark Tarantino flourishes are here - the joyous splaying of gore; the self-referential dialogue; the artful artificiality and the juxtaposition of humor and violence - but they don't add up to much.

Name : J. Hoberman / Alias : Village Voice
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment - rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The madly teeming pop-cartoon paintings of Robert Cenedella anchor a lively look at a self-styled superstar of outsider art.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
War reduced to pop entertainment should at least be easy to swallow, but this stuff keeps getting stuck in our craw. The trash that Tarantino used to elevate he now imitates.

Name : Stephen Holden / Alias : New York Times
"It's not what they show, it's what they don't show," the painter Robert Cenedella complains in "Art Bastard," Victor Kanefsky's robust, plain-talking documentary portrait of this lifelong rebel and art-world gadfly.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Tonally schizoid and rife with anachronisms (a David Bowie song on the sound track, out-of-era vernacular), Tarantino's Third Reich folly is utterly exasperating.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
With its exploded notions of heroism, torture-rack dramatics and kamikaze gusto, it's a fiendishly entertaining flick.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
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.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The New Republic
The true moral universe in which the film unfolds is that of the spaghetti westerns.: a world in which the strong are above the law and the way to tell the good guys from the bad guys is not by their acts but by the kind of hats they wear.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Variety
By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.

Name : Nick Schager / Alias : Village Voice
Manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Tarantino's signature nastiness and his juvenile delight in shocking the audience undercut the movie's larger purpose.

Name : Christy Lemire / Alias : Associated Press
If only Quentin Tarantino the director weren't so completely in love with Quentin Tarantino the writer, Inglourious Basterds might have been a great movie rather than just a good movie with moments of greatness.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Will Basterds polarize audiences? That's a given. But for anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Though "Art Bastard" is a zesty, engaging documentary about a veteran outsider, when it comes to his complexities, it's not terribly cohesive.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
These Basterds blend into a much richer story, a hugely entertaining one with stars you don't immediately see shining.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Inglorious Basterds is an entertainment but an uneasy one; it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away.

Name : Scott Von Doviak / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
For anyone who has been hoping to see Tarantino back at the top of his game, the must-see movie of the summer has finally arrived.

Name : Keith Phipps / Alias : AV Club
There's a feast here, particularly in the amazing opening, an unexpected essay on King Kong, and performances by Pitt, Laurent, and Waltz. It's just been placed on a huge table with no consideration of whether it adds up to a meal.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
Inglourious is slow, dumb - and in a first for QT in his cinema savant career - incompetent.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : I.E. Weekly
Basterds isn't a deep film - honestly, what Tarantino flick is? - but it has moments as sharp as a bayonet and as perverse as war itself.

Name : John Hartl / Alias : Seattle Times
Tarantino's wartime fantasies may leave history in the dust, but his movie is a surprisingly satisfying contribution to movies about the Holocaust.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz 
 triumphs, heroically, over Tarantino's brash, cine-drunk tall tale.

Name : Scott Marks / Alias : San Diego Reader
You may not recognize the name going in, but after spending 82 minutes watching director Victor Kanefsky cast a heartfelt lens in Cenedella's direction, you'll never forget him.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
Despite the injection of content from a variety of directions, Basterds lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino's other efforts, mainly because he can't seem to tie the whole package together.