In the cathedral of trash Quentin Tarantino is the high pontiff. Swinging his censer, making his cross signs, he has now blessed even marquee illiteracy. Computer spell-checkers will be exploding across Britain. Inglourious Basterds is, after a fashion, glourious. It is also a basterd. Tarantino has spawned it between unwedded sheets (as a pontiff would), mixing his promiscuous DNA with the tackiest known specimen of post-VE Day war cinema.

Inglourious Basterds ★★★☆☆
Quentin Tarantino

Afterschool ★★★★★
Antonio Campos

Chiko ★★☆☆☆
Ozgür Yildrim

Shorts ★☆☆☆☆
Robert Rodriguez

I Love You Beth Cooper ☆☆☆☆☆
Chris Columbus

Most of us haven’t even heard of Enzo Castellari’s 1978 film Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato, US-titled Inglorious Bastards, a sort of Italo-tripe Dirty Dozen. But many of us hadn’t or haven’t heard of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, the Hong Kong boilerplate for Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino will sort out his plagiarism suits in purgatory. For now we license his liberties, chortling at the chutzpah of a man who can adapt drivel with a serious face – this drivel being a long-reach revenge story about a French-Jewish girl having the last word with Hitler and Co – and live to collect his laurels.

As in Pulp Fiction, though without the wingdings of structure that helped that to cult status, the new movie is a weird blend of wit and wantonness. Despite his gonzo appeal to those who can’t spell, Tarantino’s skills are verbal, so there are no battle scenes as the story hauls its 150-minute, Sergio Leone-like length across four years (1941-44) and five “chapters”: from the Nazi officer (Cannes Best Actor Christoph Waltz, wittily wheedling) who orders the massacre of a farmhouse full of Jews in occupied France to the all-senses-explosive climax in a Paris cinema hosting the Third Reich’s top brass.

Suspense in the cellar: ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Dialogue scenes that should last five minutes are spun out to 20 by Tarantino’s dandyish way with irony, periphrasis and non-sequitur. The most cleverly sustained scene is a suspense piece in a cellar bar, where Allied secret agents planning the multiple assassination are (almost) unmasked by beer-lubricated German officers posing parlour-game truth challenges. Elsewhere Waltz is the scene thief supreme, perhaps the best Nazi villain in Hollywood history – a smile, a Meerschaum pipe, a gun to the head – and certainly the wittiest study in urbane antagonism since Claude Rains in Casablanca.

Only Brad Pitt, in the cast, is seriously adrift. As leader of the titular resistance band he irritates in every scene – weird tics with his chin, one-note hillbilly accent – and makes us wonder, is there a new division in the universe? Those who can dance the tarantinella (Travolta, Keitel, Thurman, Waltz) and those who can’t (Pitt)? After two and a half hours, we feel dizzied by the dance we have done ourselves: whirled around the floor of a story that goes absolutely nowhere, contains no human verities, has no significant heft as historical drama, yet still proves, now and then, an entertaining piece of Pop Disco Art from the cinema’s most talented tease.

Let us move up a level. Afterschool, written, directed and edited by Antonio Campos, is the week’s film to put in a time capsule. Finally, and brilliantly, a filmmaker has nailed the internet culture; or the use made of it at times by and for affectless youth. Since Campos is only 25 – a New Yorker living in Paris – don’t accuse him of a fogeyish antipathy to adolescents. The film, turning on the deaths by drugs of twin sisters in a co-ed prep school in the US, is a feeling disquisition on anarchy of feeling in a world where grown-ups are obsessed with lecturing us about “appropriate” responses.

Hypnotic: Ezra Miller in ‘Afterschool’

It is the great paradox of education. Do we teach the young how to think good things – by our lights – or how to think for themselves? Teenage nature adores a vacuum: that is where youngsters play, experiment and discover. But today’s vacuum, Campos argues in the multi-authored visuals he adopts as a style (mimicking the creepy ubiquity of webcams and surveillance cameras), can be a nasty blend of lawless voyeurism and authoritarian overreach.

As the film’s figures struggle to find their places in the landscape – off-kilter compositions provide here a head out of frame, there a shaky view of an empty corridor waiting for an event (and in one instance scarily getting it) – the hypnotic low-key performances by the young actors, especially lead Ezra Miller (face of Buster Keaton painted by Botticelli), are like murmurs of nascent consciousness. The teachers’ front of omniscience is never overdone. Though the headmaster castigates a boy’s “memorial video” to the slain girls, which plays like screen variations on Sartre’s Nausea (very funny, though our smile is quickly wiped), the adults are mostly disguised carriers of the same alienation virus as the kids. Confronted with a real crisis, they too are powerless, reactionless, paralysed.

Despite a facile closing twist that plays into the hands of the web era’s trashiest tabloid doomsayers, this is a major debut. A dystopic vision, yes; but in comparison with the usual school high-jinks from US cinema – see last two reviews below – fiercely fresh and corrosively memorable.

Moody thug: Denis Moschitto in ‘Chiko’

Chiko, from writer-director Ozgür Yildrim, is business as usual in the European gangland movie. We are in Hamburg, rushed along in the wake of the title Gastarbeiter (Denis Moschitto), who bites the country that feeds him by selling drugs and working for the local Mr Big (Moritz Bleibtreu, segueing from Andreas Baader to another social jewel in the Teutonic crown). The handsomely grungy photography, the moments of grislier-than-usual violence and the producing participation of film-maker Fatih Akin (Head-On) fail to rescue this moody thug epic from being a cross-Channel cousin to the UK’s mod gangster genre. The fact that the characters are Turks in Germany, rather than cockneys in Kentish Town, makes less difference than it should.

Frantic gimmickry: ‘Shorts’

Meanwhile, what a summer for the pre-teens. Suffer the little children to come with you unto Shorts and they may never forgive you. Robert Rodriguez, of the popular Spy Kids, created this poor imitation, full of frantic gimmickry you would expect to be in 3D but thank providence is not. From whirling mini-UFOs to giant animated nose bogeys, the screen is never still and the script never smart or engaging.

I Love You Beth Cooper is – I was almost going to say worse. But “worse” does inadequate justice to this spectacularly malfunctioning comedy-romance – dorky, witless boy meets teasing, witless prom queen – directed by Chris Columbus of Home Alone. What has happened to yesterday’s crowd-pleasing US film-makers? Rodriguez and Columbus should still be popular film comedy’s legitimate princes and heirs. Time, perhaps, for some new and glourious basterds.