Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
It can't seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to frighten us or make us laugh. It does a little bit of both, to be sure, but not nearly enough of either to make much of a lasting impression.

Name : Nigel Floyd / Alias : Time Out
Given that the cast improvised all the scenes live on set, the dialogue has a surprising ring of truth, and is shot through with an unexpected, often unsettling, humour.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
They spend a great deal of time roaring, bleating, squealing and snorting at a very high volume, which is, after a point, too much of a muchness.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
It's so steeped in troll and paranoia lore, it risks boring you with the details at times. But it also makes you more inclined to believe it, and the frights are real enough.

Name : Robert Abele / Alias : Los Angeles Times
A monster movie with a love for mountainous, tree-lined Scandinavian scenery and an even greater love for setting memorably ugly, hulking and destructive mythological creatures against it.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

Name : David Rooney / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
An enjoyably off-kilter hybrid of The Blair Witch Project and Where the Wild Things Are.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
Once again, material for a great short film has been expanded to feature length at its peril and ours. Still, this is clever stuff and surprisingly engrossing on its own terms.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
Yes, Troll Hunter is derivative, but Ovredal seamlessly assembles his reference points with a steady ability to do them proud.

Name : Peter Debruge / Alias : Variety
Enormously entertaining chiller.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
As de-mythologizings go, Trollhunter has neither the wit, nor art, nor social insight to honor the legacy of George A. Romero's Martin.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
With impressive technical credits, stunning fjord and forest locations and a winking ownership of its own absurdity, "Trollhunter" manages to be at once spooky, satirical and endearing.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Those fog-draped fjords provide a distractingly pretty backdrop to this tale of mysterious, massive creatures who roam the forest by night, searching for Christians on whom to munch.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Like the folks who dreamed up lycanthropy, the Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Andre Ovredal's enjoyably goofy scare-pic purports to offer real footage of real horror - in this case, a variety of forest and mountain trolls.

Name : Michael Wilmington / Alias : Chicago Reader
The film is shot with handheld cameras in the standard mockumentary style, but the content is often hilarious, especially when the trolls show up.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Trollhunter" has a lot of down time as the crew treks to the fjords, but it's also got dryly subversive humor and, eventually, some impressive special effects.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
A drily comic blend of irresistible ingredients that gets better as it goes along.

Name : Jeannette Catsoulis / Alias : NPR
Genially simpleminded and more sweet than scary, Trollhunter never settles on a tone. Fairytale fantasy, supernatural comedy, serious horror? All are sampled, to the detriment of the whole.

Name : Peter Hartlaub / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Successful on multiple levels, with a brisk pace, excellent location work and a strong lead performance by Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen.

Name : Noel Murray / Alias : AV Club
Here's what's not so good in Troll Hunter: the actual troll hunting.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
The film takes off into a witty realm of nonplussed responses and folklore made roaringly real.

Name : V.A. Musetto / Alias : New York Post
You'll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
As the stoic titular slayer, Otto Jespersen is the one actor who holds you.

Name : Mike Hale / Alias : New York Times
One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director Andre Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary "Trollhunter" is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.

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

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

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

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 : 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 : 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.