3. 'Inglourious Basterds'

Though critics either praise or denigrate Quentin Tarantino's obsessive, referential motion picture amour as the core to his pictures, their very pulsating, battered and bloody heart, it's not that simple. Truly. Even as he amped up the references 50-fold by "Kill Bill" (a stunning mélange of spaghetti Western, giallo, kung fu and more), something had shifted for the controversial auteur, something deeper, something more personal. "Death Proof" aside, gone were the Royale With Cheese speeches, or the Buddy Holly waiters, and in came a kind of filmmaking that sat on the precipice of mad hatter movie love insanity, making the director even more culturally significant, artistic, and, surprisingly, powerfully mysterious. "Inglourious Basterds" is the crowning achievement for QT's newer phase. The World War II picture is a gorgeous, hilarious, uber- violent, perfectly acted (Christoph Waltz is a revelation), genre-blending gut puncher, that, indeed, scalps a whole lot of "Gnatzies" (as Brad Pitt's hillbilly Aldo Raine memorably intones), but also shunts the viewer into the German film industry under Goebbels and the struggles of an escaped French Jewish woman (Mélanie Laurent) who survives by, naturally, running an independent movie theater. "Basterds" may have angered those who found QT's fantastical revisionism offensive, but, really, he was being honest. You want pulpy Nazi hunting set to the music from "White Lightning"? You got it. You want to feel the complexity of how we process that violence? You got that as well. Historical, personal, empathetic, vigilant, erotic, "Basterds" is an aesthetic and thematic wonder. It's filmmaking that doesn't just break the rules by daring to be old fashioned and modern all at once, but filmmaking from another dimension. QT roared and he rampaged, and we left the theater like Beatrix Kiddo: with "bloody satisfaction." -- Kim Morgan