Tarantino's glorious epic

I hardly know where to begin to praise Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds. A project over a decade in the making, this is arguably his best work since Pulp Fiction. Brad Pitt shines as the leader of a team of Jewish American soldiers who take it as their duty to scalp Nazis, Christoph Waltz's performance as linguistic genius and "Jew Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa (which landed him a much-deserved Best Actor award at Cannes) is spot-on, the unspeakably lovely French actress Mélanie Laurent plays a young French-Jewish girl on the run, and Samuel L. Jackson even shows up to narrate in true Tarantino fashion.

At 2 hours and 37 minutes, not a reference is wasted: Basterds is a revenge war film in keeping with the best of them, but it is also an homage to the history of cinema. Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, Italian spaghetti war films, and in the vein of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (the scene with Mike Myers as a British general who stores his drink and decanters inside a globe bears similarity to Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel's dance with an inflatable globe), this is truly an epic work of art. The graphic gore that is one of Tarantino's many signatures plays second fiddle to his larger talent for witty, tension-building dialogue. He doesn't ask but rather requires audiences to relish in every aspect of what Eli Roth deemed "kosher porn," and it is about time. In its exorcising irreverence for the centuries of pain inflicted upon the Jewish people and the world, Inglourious Basterds may be just what the doctor ordered.