If the trailers do their best to peddle Brad Pitt blasting his way through The Dirty Dozen, Part Deux, don’t blame Harvey Weinstein and Universal for trying. Whatever they thought they’d be getting for their reported $70 million, it wasn’t the _Moulin Rouge! _of war movies. By which I mean one set in Nazi-occupied Europe at pretty much the level that Puccini’s Tosca takes place during the Napoleonic Wars. One crammed to the gills with elaborate palaver in subtitled French and German. One that builds to a plot to kill Hitler that plays out like The Wizard of Oz transposed to the Third Reich and rewritten by Tennessee Williams on a binge...

it ought to go without saying that Tarantino’s characters are strictly unbelievable as human beings. Magnified to the mythic max, they’re the L. Frank Baum versions of 1939–45: the Plucky French Jewess, the Suave Nazi Monster, the Caustic Kraut Sexpot, the Erudite British Commando, and the other stalwart fixtures of a bazillion Gott in Himmel comic books. But the movie’s preposterousness is its poetry. Most operas are preposterous, too—kind of by definition, which must be why devotees never stop blathering about being transported—and you’re a hell of a lot less likely to doze off at this one.

After I saw “Inglourious Basterds” at Cannes, although I was writing a daily blog, I resisted giving an immediate opinion about it. I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I’m glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time. Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film.