Thinking about Quentin Tarantino's career is very much a bittersweet exercise in nostalgia for filmgoers of a certain age. 'Reservoir Dogs' is the fifth and lower-sixth form: a film available solely on bootleg VHS-from-laserdisc copy. 'Pulp Fiction' is inseparable from 'Trainspotting' as the two touchstone films for students at British universities in the late 1990s (though 'Dusk 'til Dawn' is the Tarantino-albeit-directed-by Rodriguez film from the era that some secretly prefer) while 'Jackie Brown' was a gift to the chin-stroking contrarians who hold it to be Tarantino's underappreciated masterpiece (which, incidentally, it is).

In a way it is appropriate that such a lengthy period separated early-Tarantino from his more recent works. 'Kill Bill' one and two and 'Death Proof' are very different films, both in substance and in resonance. Tarantino seems to have retreated into his movie-geek shell, interested less in creating new work than reveling in pastiche - finely crafted and very knowing but pastiche nonetheless. The grand guignol melodrama of 'Kill Bill' and the cheesy mock-cack-handedness of 'Death Proof' are faded and lackluster beside the iconic imagery of 'Dogs', the vivid characters of 'Fiction' and the individual and ensemble performances in 'Brown'.

Where does 'Basterds' fit into this? The first impression is of a continuation of 'Kill Bill'/'Death Proof' grave robbery - the title comes from an Italian schlock-cinema piece of the 1970s. However this is no pastiche, and aside from a few doses of extreme gore the tone is surprisingly low-key, though not cheap-looking in a conventional sense. There is a tangible sense of the sound-stage to the interior scenes but I don't think it is going too far to see this as intentional: that Tarantino set out to produce a work that reeks of cinema.

This accords with a more broader feeling (or at least hope): that Tarantino is perhaps moving on to a new phase of his career, leaving behind an obsession with the trashier side of cinema for movies that turn his tendency (predilection? obsession?) with self-conscious film-making into a musing on the art-form itself.

Pretentious? Perhaps, but that is a staple adjective for anyone who seriously champions Tarantino, and it is at least arguable that this film deserves championing more than his other recent work. For a start it has been horrendously mis-sold as a World War II 'men on a mission' film in the vein of 'The Guns of Navarone', 'The Dirty Dozen' and 'Saving Private Ryan'. It is not this sort of film. It seems rather to sit one level above - examining what the purpose of such films is and both exemplifying and satirizing this purpose. These films exist to make us feel good about winning the war - to pit heroism against the jackbooted Nazi hordes (it is not a coincidence that every German in this movie is a "Natzee" to Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine).

Tarantino adds another dimension - using this type of film as a vehicle for Jewish revenge fantasies - the Basterds themselves are all Jewish, as is Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), an orphan and one of the film's key protagonists.

On the one hand, Shosanna's story plays out in intense, almost Hitchcockian style as she tries to avoid detection and arrest in occupied Paris while pursuing her own agenda against the Nazi invaders. On the other, the Basterds rampage across occupied Europe: an out-and-out parody of films such as 'Navarone', 'Dozen', 'The Heroes of Telemark' and 'Where Eagles Dare'.

The two come together in a ludicrously OTT final reel where the true medium of Jewish revenge becomes clear - the movies themselves, which both literally destroy the Nazis in the context of this story and have figuratively done so through 60 years of Hollywood film-making. The final irony being, as 'Basterds' makes clear, that the Nazi regime saw the cinema as the best way of propagating its own myths and propaganda.

It's ambitious stuff, and it almost works. The trouble with such a highfalutin concept is that it can make for a confusing narrative. The two plots make awkward bedfellows, not helped by a lengthy detour to introduce an English officer (Michael Fassbender's Lt Archie Hicox) whose purpose in the overall scheme of things is unclear. The Tarantino verbosity is also present and correct, and can get a little wearying at times. That said it is generally used to good effect - compare the wordy but grippingly tense opening scene with the interminable first 45 minutes or so of "Death Proof".

Other elements are difficult to fault - the only bum note in the casting is the eminently hateable Eli Roth (director of 'Hostel', here playing Sgt. Donny Donowitz), Brad Pitt's Lt Raine is a work of utter joy (the scene where he impersonates an Italian film-maker is one of the funniest things in any Tarantino film) and Christoph Waltz (as the 'Jew-hunter' Col. Hans Landa) has been rightly praised.

Perhaps the main problem is the nature of the project. This is not a work of art in and of its own right, but a commentary on the medium - an essay in propaganda and the use of war-related fiction (dressed up with some fake blood and the preposterous accent of Pitt). Interesting, very well-executed but not great story-telling.

This is the most obvious difference with Tarantino's other work: for once the narrative takes a back-seat. The result is pleasantly surprising, and certainly of more obvious merit than his other work of the last ten years, but still falls short of his iconic 1990s output - in the final analysis it is just a more polished facet of Tarantino the film-geek, and it turns out that an educated and active interest in cinema as an art-form is not quite a substitute for youthful exuberant joy. Still, at least he doesn't have a cameo in it.

Stephen Lavington is the author of a critical guide to the work of Oliver Stone.