Inglourious Basterds

AroView: Quentin Tarantino’s cocky, revisionist war epic channeling spaghetti westerns and the Dirty Dozen follows a renegade Jewish-American resistance hellbent on murdering and disfiguring Nazi war criminals.

Alternating between Brad Pitt’s Nazi-hunting green berets and a Jewish cinema owner (Melanie Laurent) plotting to blow up her theatre with Hitler inside, the film’s concept is nothing if not mischievous fun, further inflated by at least one flamboyant, eye-catching performance. Although exceptionally talky and overlong, Tarantino’s self-indulgences are also for once kept on the down-low, with cinema references tied distinctively to German propaganda film and Weimar-era expressionism – all set amongst lavishly art directed surroundings.