"Never hurrying, but never lingering, The Inglorious Bastards is a tribute to the kind of relaxed, professional B-list filmmaking that existed for decades before it was killed by television and rising production costs," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "In [Enzo] Castellari's hands, a gang of naked, submachine-gun-wielding Nazi women comes off like just another surreal incident on the way to the Swiss border. In [Quentin] Tarantino's remake, it will probably be a breathless, glossy shot that reviewers will talk about for years. But while the remake will most likely have a Saving Private Ryan-size budget and A-list stars, it probably won't be able to recapture the original's sense of a professional team of men on a mission: to complete their movie against all odds."

"Yet another very good American movie that vanished from theaters in the blink of an eye but will be found enduring on on the DVD shelf is George A Romero's Diary of the Dead," writes Daniel Kasman. "The lean, but robust umpteenth entry in the director's decade-spanning zombie series, Diary of the Dead, on its modest scale, gets it all right: broad but brawny characterizations, stalwart, plucky survival, a healthy dose of social criticism, and uncomfortable, necessary violence." Related: Philippa Hawker's interview with Romero in the Age.

(This originally appeared on GreenCine Daily.)

Now then: "The behemothic, almost impossible to see, hardcore-critic-exalted art film legends keep coming at us on DVD - will there be any Holy Grails left? - but it's likely that no movie has been awaited as intensely and with as high expectations as Béla Tarr's Satantango (1994)," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Finally, after literally years of rumors and broken promises and restoration troubles, Facets has brought this cathedral of a movie to disc, and we can all explore its frontiers at will.... Films like Satantango may not necessarily change your life, but they cannot help but become a part of it once they are experienced." Update, 7/24: Jason Anderson for Artforum: "It may sound absurd to say that a seven-hour movie has hardly a wasted moment - as famously insisted by Susan Sontag - but Tarr's minimalism has maximum impact, especially when the film's satiric nature becomes more prominent in the final hour." Also: Maria Komodore on GC Guru.

Also reviewed: Eagle Shooting Heroes, "a Hong Kong self-parody that's as utterly goofy and bubbly and schticky as any Keystone Kops two-reeler, but packed with ordinarily stoic stars (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, Tony Leung Ka Fai, etc) making ridiculous hay of their screen personas and the entire wuxia pian genre."

DVDs, 7/15.

"It's amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn't really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) might've been the first," suggests Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Did cinema change with the war, or did we? Two new movies to DVD, Reha Erdem 's Times and Winds (2006) and Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (2007), make their individual cases that little outside of the movie dynamic has changed at all, and that life as a 12-year-old in any corner of the globe is still subject to the grinding, merciless self-involvement of the adult world."  Read "DVD Spotlight: 7/15" >>

We come back from the sizzling holiday weekend with heatwave of new releases, including one from Criterion, a music doc, a horror classic, several fine indie films and much more. Step on inside to cool off and check out the rest.