Quentin TarantinoHas one of the most overrated directors of the '90s become one of the most underrated of the aughts?

Quentin Tarantino concludes his seventh feature, the Nazi-bludgeoning fantasy Inglourious Basterds, with a grisly flourish and a self-satisfied review. Having performed one of his signature mutilations, a character peers down at his handiwork and into the camera and declares: "This might just be my masterpiece." This is typical Tarantino bluster, in keeping with the image of the bratty wunderkind that he worked hard to cultivate and that, even at 46, he refuses to outgrow. But as the rare filmmaker who's also an avid reader of film reviews, he also surely knows that it's been a while since the critical establishment thought of him as a maker of masterpieces.

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Since it premiered at Cannes in May, Basterds has met with some wildly conflicting reactions (some of them—no surprise given its breezily outrageous approach to a loaded subject—highly negative and morally accusatory). Tarantino's career since Pulp Fiction continues to seem like one long backlash. Could it be that one of the most overrated directors of the '90s has become one of the most underrated of the aughts?

Tarantino's filmography is split in two by the six-year gap that separated Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), during which, among other things, he worked on the notoriously unwieldy Basterds screenplay (which was at one point supposed to be a miniseries). The received wisdom has it that he never quite made a comeback. But the criticisms most frequently leveled against him these days—he's a rip-off artist, he makes movies that relate only to other movies, he knows nothing of real life, he could use some sensitivity training—apply equally, if not more so, to the earlier films. (Reservoir Dogs lifted many of its tricks directly from the Hong Kong film City on Fire; Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are the Tarantino movies with the most flamboyant use of racist language.) Reviewers and audiences may have wearied of the blowhard auteur, but there's an argument to be made that Tarantino, far from a burnout case, is just hitting his stride, and that his movies, in recent years, have only grown freer and more radical.

Taken as a yin-yang whole, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 constitute a globe-spanning feat of genre scholarship, blithely connecting the dots from Chinese kung fu to Japanese swordplay, from blaxploitation to manga to spaghetti Western. Tarantino's reference-happy method is often dismissed as know-it-all geekery or stunted nostalgia, the video-store dreams of an eternal fanboy. But there is something strikingly of the moment and perhaps even utopian about Kill Bill's obsessive pastiche, which at once celebrates and demonstrates the possibilities of the voracious, hyperlinked 21^st-century media gestalt: the idea that whole histories and entire worlds of pop culture are up for grabs, waiting to be revived, reclaimed, remixed.

First released as part of Grindhouse, 2007's double-header exercise in retro sleaze, Death Proof confirmed that Tarantino has no interest, or maybe is incapable of, straightforward homage, even when that's the nominal assignment. While partner in crime Robert Rodriguez tossed off a scattershot bit of zombie schlock for his contribution (Planet Terror), Tarantino borrowed a few motifs from sorority slashers and car-chase zone-outs and fashioned a curious formal experiment that would have given a '70s exploitation producer fits. Death Proof (on DVD in an unrated, extended version) is split down the middle into mirror-image halves. In each segment, the same scenario unfolds (with very different outcomes): a group of young women has a scary run-in with Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a killer in a muscle car, and the exhilarating final burst of action is preceded by a provocatively long bout of directionless yapping.

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