Quentin Tarantino - Indispensable Auteur or Flash in the Pan?

Hot on their heals, though, is a very unlikely contender. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, with its ultra-violence and questionable WW2 knowledge, received an unprecedented eight nominations prompting QT to make a statement in reaction.

The 46 year-old director said: "I am simply very proud that Inglourious Basterds has been so well received. I was always talked about for my first two films like I was some sort of flash in the pan. But then I went from flavour of the month, to flavour of the year, to flavour of the decade. Now, at the end of two decades in the business, well maybe I'm not the flavour of anything. I am here to stay."

In another interview, Tarantino also went on to say how, with the release of Inglourious Basterds, he can now be classed as an auteur.

Is now really the time for Tarantino to be ranked alongside other auteurs? The Tennessee native has only made seven films in an 18 year career after all - it usually takes until much later in their career that a director can be labelled an 'auteur'. More importantly, there is still a legion of critics out there that think Tarantino's time has long passed and that he made his only good work in his first two years in the business.

It was in 1992 that Tarantino first came onto the movie scene with heist-gone-wrong flick Reservoir Dogs. A dark thriller/neo-noir/black comedy, the movie shattered Hollywood's idea of filmmaking - editing a film out of sequence alone was virtually unheard of at this point in American cinema. So good was Tarantino's debut (perhaps the best debut ever produced), it still stands as one of the most glorious pieces of pure cinema ever committed to film.

Tarantino followed Dogs up with arguably his greatest achievement: breakthrough gangster movie Pulp Fiction (1994) - again structured in a non-linear fashion, Pulp Fiction established Tarantino's proficiency for crafting characters and storyline out of pulpy, naturalistic dialogue. Like nothing ever seen in mainstream American cinema before, Pulp Fiction made a huge impact when it was first released; now the dust has settled, it can be appreciated as a crime masterpiece.

Add to those two successes the outstanding lovers on the lam thriller True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), both of which he wrote, and it's understandable why QT was initially embraced so ecstatically: he proved himself as a natural, cine-literate filmmaker, an actor's director and a genius wordsmith.

It's also understandable why, taking those unparalleled two years into account, Tarantino's fitful success post-1994 have led many to dismiss him as just another "flash in the pan". The years after Pulp Fiction, depending on your view, have either seen the director spend years carefully honing some unique pieces of work or take unnecessarily extended breaks between lacklustre movies.

To think that, though, is to ignore his underrated crime drama Jackie Brown (1997), easily Tarantino's most mature film and his only picture with a conscience. There is no 'Marvin getting shot in the head' sequence here - Jackie Brown's violence is sudden, matter-of-fact, disturbing.

We are also presented with QT's only conventional romance, and it's happening between Pam Grier and Robert Forster's middle-aged pair. Not only does the director dare to dispense with Hollywood convention and create a romantic liaison between a couple above their 20s, but he makes it believable, even heart-warming. Dismissed at the time as a lesser effort, Jackie Brown can now be viewed as one of Tarantino's best - it's also the only time you can tell that one of his films were made by an adult rather than a hyperactive cinephile.

Then there's hyper-violent revenge actioner Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003), one of the most entertaining films of the '00s. The whole film drips with style, QT dispensing with the slow-burn feel of Jackie Brown and returning to the sheer engrossing nature of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

It was with Tarantino's two subsequent films, however, that the director's detractors (rightfully) began to get louder.

Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004) was a sporadically entertaining piece filled with tedious dialogue and Death Proof (2007) was even worse - its dialogue is so stilted, its characters so one-dimensional and the action so dull that it's hard to even believe Tarantino was the man behind it.

2009, thankfully, finally erased any memories of Kill Bill Volume 2 and the monster that was Death Proof: World War 2 action movie Inglourious Basterds violently exploded its way onto cinema screens to display what Tarantino does best, and everything that makes Tarantino movies so great was in place.

For one, there is the eclectic, multi-national cast: American Brad Pitt joins forces with Brit Michael Fassbender, German Diane Kruger and French Melanie Laurent to face off against Austrian Christoph Waltz and Spanish Daniel Bruhl. As he always did on his best form, Tarantino draws note-perfect performances out of them all - Pitt is charismatic, Laurent is tortured and virtual newcomer Waltz does something completely unexpected: he tops every previous Tarantino-movie performance.

The director's quotable, lyrical dialogue is also back in force, his words leaving his characters' mouths like violent, curse-heavy poetry. His writing on Basterds is his best since Pulp Fiction and, in the case of the opening sequence (in which Waltz's Nazi Colonel Hans Landa visits a French dairy farm in search of a hiding Jewish family), even better.

However, the film doesn't help the argument that first came to light against Tarantino on his Kill Bill movies: his tendency to be indulgent. Given editing to tighten the picture up, Basterds could have, and should have, been QT's best since Pulp Fiction. As it stands, the film is over-long, aggravating...but often brilliant. I can only hope this frustrating indulgency isn't what we continue to associate the director with - with a little more control over his work, Quentin Tarantino could return to being one of the most exciting things about modern cinema. Maybe then we'll be able to consider him as a true auteur.

See the trailer for Inglourious Basterds below. Judge it.