"Allied" may be a calculating WW2-era romance, but it's hard to care when the film is so marvelously effective.

Allied, a World War II-era romantic thriller starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as spies from Canada and France, is a film with a split personality. In the first third or so, Allied plays like a conventional adventure-romance, something akin to Casablanca—and indeed the movie makes obvious references to the great Bergman and Bogart love story, such as the fact that it’s set in Casablanca in 1942. But then the film shifts in tone, becoming something darker and more somber for our spy-heroes, after fate twists their fake romance into a real one, and questions of nationality and loyalty become blurred in the name of love.

The movie opens with a hell of a shot: Brad Pitt, as Max Vatan, a Canadian spy working for British intelligence, parachuting onto the Moroccan desert. Pitt knows how to make an entrance, and the scene feels like something out of a James Bond. Upon arriving in Casablanca, Max quickly finds Marianne (Cotillard), who’s lunching with some French and German friends, all of them Nazi sympathizers. Marianne introduces Max as her husband, a character for whom Marianne has already amassed an array of details, even taking the time to furnish a wardrobe for him. Max is happy to play along, even beyond the typical calls of the job. That night, on the roof of their apartment, Marianne kisses Max, and the act of playing at love ignites the real thing. Of course, their mission also fuels their passion: Nothing binds two people together quite like assassinating a Nazi ambassador: Allied accepts the premise of every Bond movie that espionage is an aphrodisiac.

But Allied isn’t a James Bond movie. Director Robert Zemeckis, working from a script by Stephen Knight, goes for our emotional jugular, an act which is both cruel and satisfying. As a protegé of Steven Spielberg (who in his early career especially could transmute pop into art that moves us), Zemeckis instinctively wants to give us an emotionally big thriller, and the movie goes down some dark passages to fulfill that desire. Zemeckis lunges for significance with big themes and big emotions. You may feel like you're being manipulated, and yet, that may be half the fun.

Brad Pitt's performance jostles between effective and insufficient. At times he lacks the equipment to handle the emotional ups and downs of Max Vatan's life. However, at 53, Pitt is in terrific shape, and he's still convincing when he brandishes a machine gun or pilots an airplane or punches somebody's lights out. And to Brad Pitt's credit, he doesn't resort to histrionics, as though he were forcing himself into a more emotional performance, when a scene turns dark. Instead he turns stoic, like a pillar of marble. And maybe that's the right instinct of a star who knows his strengths and his weaknesses.

And then there's Marion Cotillard, dark and brooding, who also evokes that Old Hollywood star quality, and who has a vivid, almost palpable spark of life inside her. Cotillard commands our attention with those dark eyes and red lips and her somberly romantic expression: She can appear tragic even when she isn’t; she's alluring, deceptive, mysterious, like a modern-day Ingrid Bergman, so how could anyone--including Brad Pitt--resist her? In a sense, Pitt belongs in the first version of this movie, the one that keeps the tragedy of the war at an arm’s length; Cotillard, we sense, has been living inside the other movie all along, waiting for the tables to turn.

But the two work marvelously well together, fortunately, and even if Robert Zemeckis is a calculating director, meticulously assembling all the right elements, his stars twist the material back into something with heart. Zemeckis smartly knows that we must care about them in order to care about this movie. His calculations pay off, too, when the relationship between Max and Marianne collides into worldwide conflicts, like in a tense party scene at their home in suburban London, in which the city is besieged by a Nazi blitz, and a German fighter plane turns into an infernal torpedo and descends right toward their house. Never has the blitz felt more terrifying to someone who wasn't alive when it actually happened. And if Allied is calculating and cruel, it's also magnificently entertaining and, in the end, sobering.

With Jared Harris, Matthew Goode, Lizzy Caplan, Anton Lesser, August Diehl, Simon McBurney, and Camille Cottin.

"The Big Short" takes a deftly comic look at the 2008 housing bubble.

At once documentary and narrative, comical and cynical, The Big Short is a refreshingly un-self-important end-of-the-year release from director Adam McKay. McKay, who’s best known for making such silly comedies as Anchorman and Talladega Nights, has plenty of experience with movies about terrible people in positions of power. Now he’s made a film which depicts real people who did real damage, even though some of the names have been changed. The Big Short examines the housing market crash of 2007-08 and the financial entrepreneurs who predicted it and profited by it. It’s a virtual who’s-who of the country’s greediest people. The film’s wry tone will likely overshadow the real weight of its subject matter. But thematically speaking, this movie is on the level of a massive-scaled Victorian novel: It’s both fascinated by and critical of capitalism, and even if it doesn’t punish its characters with the moral authority of a Trollope or a Dickens, it’s a film capable of lighting a fire in its audience.

The material covered by The Big Short (it’s adapted by McKay and Charles Randolph from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book) is dense and at times confusing if you are, like me, woefully under-educated about sub-prime mortgages and swaps and all things mortgage-related. McKay knows his material is difficult, which may be one of the reasons he resorts to at times audacious moments of humor. The market’s crash was, of course, a very bad thing for a lot of people. And you can feel the film’s indignation as it depicts all of the financial entrepreneurs who profited by the crash. Playing hedge fund manager Michael Burry, Christian Bale is—according to the movie—the first to recognize a housing bubble. It’s 2005, and Burry, who wears a T-shirt and cargo shorts to the office and blitzes himself out to heavy metal while he stares into a computer screen all day, decides to short the market. His colleagues are horrified that Burry will bring their company to ruin, and the big lending companies are only too happy to take his money, never dreaming that Burry will ultimately be taking theirs.

The film tracks various other financial people who, like Burry, make the decidedly amoral choice to short the housing market, to profit off the impending financial ruin of others. Their attitude is: Anyone can figure this out, but nobody’s looking, so why not us? Moreover, the mortgage industry had been giving housing loans to anyone with a signature. Why shouldn’t they take advantage of the bad behavior of these lending companies who are offering the American Dream to those who cannot afford it?

McKay really emerges as a first-rate director here. Anchorman and Talladega Nights have their moments, but they are both too loosey-goosey in their structure. Working with different material and different actors, and fueled by healthy cynicism, McKay has found his niche as a director. At times, the actors speak directly to the camera, but their speech is always laced with humor, as though we were watching one of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries. At other times, the movie is surprisingly humane in its treatment of its characters. Steve Carell, playing another investor, named Mark Baum, is a good example of this. Baum is a prickly rat of a man (he looks like Templeton from Charlotte’s Webb) who barges into his group therapy session and interrupts everyone with his loud complaining, only to leave again to take a phone call. He’s caught up in the noise of his own life because he’s doesn’t want to deal with a personal tragedy for which he feels guilty. Later, he’s the one who realizes that taking advantage of other people’s bad practices isn’t good: it’s just more bad behavior.

Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt co-star, although their performances don’t really register. Gosling is quite good at playing a self-aggrandizing asshole, and does that very well here. Pitt’s character is the most laid-back of the bunch: he’s into sustainable living, since he believes the crash will permanently wreck the global economy. (Sustainable living is so much easier when you’re rich.)

With Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Finn Wittrock, Max Greenfield, Stanley Wong, and in amusing cameos, Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez.

Thelma & Louise

A blockbuster about the friendship between two women is rare. Not because they can’t make money, but because studios think of them as risky. Thelma & Louise (1991) isn’t always successful as a movie, but it is successful as a study of two women who’ve been burned one too many times by the men in their lives and the men who run the world. Thelma and Louise take it on the lam after unexpectedly committing murder (that of a rapist pig) and most of the film dramatizes their trek through the West toward Mexico as the police struggle to keep up with them. 

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are perfectly cast, and it is their performances and the bond that develops between these two characters that breathes a real vitality into what is really a very conventional Hollywood road movie. It’s nowhere near as groundbreaking as Bonnie and Clyde was in terms of violence, and yet, it’s tremendously groundbreaking in the way it portrays women who, once they’ve tasted freedom from the shackles of their former lives, finally start to feel alive. It’s somewhat surprising to see a movie like Thelma & Louise come from a director such as Ridley Scott, even though he did give us such a strong female character in Alien (Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley). But this is a different, deeper approach to exploring the lives of women on the screen, and the film is bolstered by many loose scenes of the two ladies talking, laughing, or in some cases, just looking at each other and communicating whole worlds of expression. That dynamic is what makes Thelma & Louise an important film, even if the parts of the movie are better than the whole. The affection that we as an audience feel for them is also very deep and true, and, like Bonnie and Clyde before it, the film thus succeeds in getting its audience to root for the “bad guys.” 

So much of what happens to Thelma and Louise is filtered through a lens of experience that is all too believable: Women are not just bossed around by men, they’re controlled by them in a much deeper way that creates in some women a need for the prisons that men create. They become victims of Stockholm Syndrome, if you will. We see it in the early scenes of Thelma & Louise, especially with Geena Davis’s character, whose husband neglects her, mocks her, and belittles her, and demands domestic labor of her, all the while carrying on affairs. 

As the movie progresses, the two women transform from their dowdy, frumpishly dressed former-selves, so weary of the world, into more confident, sexually aware (but not self-exploitive) and powerful women. Susan Sarandon never looks more radiant than with her hair framing her face or blowing in the wind as she pounds away at the dusty highways of the American West. And Geena Davis's Thelma, who is so inept at first and so afraid to do anything that might exercise her own agency, becomes incredibly self-assured. These transformations are indeed fascinating, and they make the film’s legendary ending all the more poignant and, strangely, satisfying. 

Thelma & Louise actually has more in common with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is after all a buddy movie that tries very hard to transmute its tragic elements into comedy. (In the case of Thelma & Louise, this works intermittently, more consistently in the last half of the movie.) With Harvey Keitel as an Arkansas cop investigating the murder and subsequent flight of the two suspects; Brad Pitt as a sweet-talking hitchhiker; also Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Timothy Carhart, Jason Beghe, and Marco St. John. Written by Calli Khouri; music by Hans Zimmer; cinematography by Adrian Biddle.   

12 Years A Slave

12 Years A Slave is the most intense movie about slavery that I've ever seen. It's based on the experience of Solomon Northup (played with real power and restraint by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man living in Saratoga, New York with his wife and two children. Northrup is kidnapped and sent to Georgia where he serves multiple masters, ranging from passively kind but cowardly (Benedict Cumberbatch) to downright sadomasochistic (Michael Fassbender).

This film adaptation of Northup's experiences really puts his plight into perspective. You might say he'd been living an easy life up until his captivity, but seeing how the plantations work off the sweat and soul-crushing of other black people transforms him. And then there's the sheer ugly moral ambiguity of being a slave: do you run and abandon your fellow slaves? Do you put the ones who've been subjected to particular cruelty and torture out of their misery? Can you ever trust any white people, ever again? I found myself wanting Django to appear and slaughter all the slave owners, and as slowly and painfully as they had tortured their slaves.

But there's a problem for me with 12 Years a Slave: it's a harrowing, torturous movie, full of lashings and abuses that feel too real to watch. Obviously--they really did happen, and they really were horrifying. Sometimes the camera stops and lingers, forcing us to watch the lashings over and over, or poor Solomon being hanged, but low enough to the ground that he can just barely touch the muddy earth with his feet and keep his neck from breaking. It's like we're marinating in the awfulness of slavery. Is this punishment? Is this "good for us?" Is this real cinema, transcending the superficial limits of entertainment and instead treating us to some kind of moral cleansing? I'm not sure.

Thankfully, the performance of Chiwetel Ejiofor keeps the movie from turning into a total exercise in despair. As the years drag on, Solomon somehow manages to keep his wits about him, and he uses his intellect to stave off some of the abuse that others around him incur. (There is one scene where he beats the shit out of some trashy overseer, played by Paul Dano, and you don't want him to stop. You want him to beat the man into the ground and then start on the next person he sees with the same indignant ferocity.)

But it does mean that 12 Years a Slave often leaves the realm of 'entertainment' for the realm of 'message movie.' This is director Steve McQueen's attempt to demonstrate for us the horrors of slavery. And it is in turn horrific. Is it appropriately horrific? I suppose it is, in the way Schindler's List is appropriately horrific. It's not something I ever need to see again, but I'd refer anyone who wants to have some kind of visceral experience of slavery and how evil it is to this movie. This is a good companion (or should I say contrast?) to Gone With the Wind, with its decidedly rosier appreciation of the South pre- and post-Civil War.

And yes, I cried when he was reunited with his family. It was, again, very intense. Not for the easily disturbed.

With Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt (who co-produced), Adepero Oduye, Paul Giamatti, Garret Dillahunt, Scoot McNairy, Alfre Woodard, and Chris Chalk. Beautiful cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, although the subject matter makes it hard to admire his occasional shots of the loveliness of moss hanging from trees on the banks of lazy Southern rivers. The very landscape feels tainted. Screenplay by John Ridley. ★★½

World War Z

In World War Z, the zombies twitch and jerk like junkies, and they go after humans like they're walking meth containers. This is a zombie film for those who felt 28 Days Later was too microscopic. Instead of staying in one general geographic location, World War Z takes us on a North By Northwest-ish tour of various countries as the hero of the film (Brad Pitt) tries to figure out the root cause of the zombie apocalypse, which is quickly overtaking the entire world. 

The current apocalypse-chic has produced some rather odd but familiar entertainment: there's a new show about a small town that becomes encased by an invisible dome. (It's from a book by Stephen King and is being executive produced by Steven Spielberg.) Man of Steel had an apocalyptic ring to it: Krypton was compromised (and obliterated) because its inhabitants exploited their own planet, and Earth is threatened with annihilation by the calculating General Zod. The latest in this long string of end-of-the-world science fictions is World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks. It was adapted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof, and between the three of them are the scripts of half-a-dozen action-science fiction-horror movies of the last few years (including Prometheus, Star Trek Into Darkness and The Cabin in the Woods.)

While World War Z puts us back in the territory of Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later, it's more deeply rooted in the stories of H.G. Wells and the like. The film seeks to locate and understand the cause of the fast-acting bacteria that turns people into zombies: energetic, jerky, violent, fast-moving zombies. The plague spreads across the earth, and eventually an ex-United Nations operations guy (Pitt) is summoned to help a doctor and a team of Navy SEALS investigate what might be the root of the plague, in South Korea. Of course, this is just the first stop of the movie. We're privy to the destruction of New York City in a prelude featuring Pitt with his family, a wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters. Then after South Korea, we wind up in Jerusalem and then Wales and ultimately Nova Scotia.

There are moments when you cannot tell what's happening. I regret that I am beginning to sound like a broken record when I report to you this common flaw in actiony movies. But it's persistent throughout many of these films. In the scene in NYC, it's virtually impossible to tell what's happening while the family tries to flee the crisis that erupts downtown right in front of their eyes. But when the movie takes a breath, and the human story is allowed to build and thrive, World War Z is an absorbing and suspenseful thriller. And eventually that nasty habit of shaky camera-work becomes less necessary, so that most of the later scenes of suspense and terror aren't as jarring. They're just suspenseful and even a little bit spooky. The film has even a touch of humor at times, and Brad Pitt represents the kind of hero audiences will root for. He's determined and likable.

Overall, World War Z will please genre fans as long as they aren't expecting too much novelty. There are a few annoying plot devices (stupid actions that characters do to bring about a proverbial shit-storm of zombie turmoil on themselves and others), but you forgive them because the movie works much of the time. It pushes all the right buttons, and the last half-hour at the World Health Organization is quite tense and even, dare I say it, fun. Directed by Marc Foster. With James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox, David Morse, Ludi Boeken, Fana Mokoena, Daniella Kertesz, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Ruth Negga. 116 min. ★★★ 

Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly feels gloomy and vacant, humorless. It's a hollow crime drama. I suppose that's an appropriately realistic way for a crime drama to be. But I was wanting something more fun. Brad Pitt is a talented actor when he's given the right material. He's not bad here, and yet he's not entirely right for this role. His character, an apparently talented hitman who doesn't like to put his victims through any emotional or physical torment, preferring instead a quick and painless assassination, is uninteresting. He's not flashy or cool in the way a Brad Pitt character needs to be to make him truly come alive as a performer. His name is Jackie Cogan (the source material, by author George V. Higgins, is the novel Cogan's Trade), and his services are enlisted by a bunch of mobster-looking corporate guys who were robbed during a poker game.

The perpetrators of this robbery are two ne'er-do-well types: a drugged out Aussie named Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) and a chatty career criminal named Frankie (Scoot McNairy). They don't have much finesse when it comes to holding people up, but they manage to pull off the job anyway. There's a bit of a hole in the plot: the sort of 'master-of-ceremonies' of the poker game, played by Ray Liotta, had already gotten away with robbing the game several years back. He eventually admitted this, and by then was laughed at, good-naturedly, and tentatively forgiven. Knowing that he would be blamed for any subsequent robberies, the two hoods feel confident they can get away with it scott-free. The fact that Liotta wasn't rubbed out after his admission seems like a weak point in the script, and the entire movie hinges on it, loosely.

Not only does the film seem to rest on a fuzzy, poorly worked out detail, but it's relentlessly talkative, and not in the Quentin Tarantino isn't-it-great-how-clever-the-script-is kind of way. Mostly it's a bunch of scenes of has-been criminals hashing out the details of how they're planning to perform an upcoming job, but revealing more about their own insecurities and failings in the process. It's a bit like seeing someone's father cry. And the talkiness feels like padding, not entertainment.

There's some artfulness to director Andrew Dominik's imagining of all this. (Take note of a spoiler here.) He turns one scene--in which Pitt shoots Liotta while he's at a red light--into an almost scientific display of the bullet exiting the gun, torpedoing through the window glass, through Liotta's hand raised in self-defense, into his face and out the back (all in slow motion, of course). But that's not really impressive. It's just a little better than having to sit through another brutal killing scene. (Liotta already figures in a particularly unwatchable sequence where two hired men beat the hell out of him. It's quite distasteful to look at it.)

There's an obvious political agenda in Killing Them Softly that doesn't quite take. Throughout the movie, anywhere there's a radio or a television, we hear or see clips of President Bush and President-Elect Obama (the movie is set at the end of 2008) talking about the financial crisis. Is this some kind of ironic explanation of the motivations of hit men? Apparently it's an indictment of American morality, as Pitt confirms in his rant at the end of the movie, closing the film out with an admittedly funny line: "America's not a country. It's just a business. Now f***ing pay me."

With Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Sam Shepard, Slaine, Vincent Curatola, and Max Casella. ★★

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

An elegiac Western, brooding with grim death, about the life and death of Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt. Director Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Richard Deakins capture the vastness of the Midwestern terrain which serves as the stage for the countless train robberies and stand-offs and meandering conversations in breezy meadows. It's vacuous like a Terrence Malick film, and while its subject has a certain dramatic pull, watching it lumber along for nearly three hours reminded me why Westerns are so utterly unappealing, with a few exceptions. They're either gratuitously unrealistic to the point of being macho right-wing fantasies or they're so grimly realistic that you can't get an inkling of enjoyment out of them (much like Meek's Cutoff). It's quiet and ponderous like There Will Be Blood, which is a better movie. It had a poetic energy to it while Jesse James feels torpid and unimaginative.

Brad Pitt tries to layer a philosophical undercurrent into his performance as Jesse James, and Casey Affleck, as the calculating Robert Ford in the title, turns squeaky-voiced weaselly-ness into an art form--an undignified, desperately unappealing one. Pitt registers. He's an actor who hasn't really gotten his due. But the movie is unsustained--parts are better than the whole--and so his performance and his staying power are rendered somewhat less effective. The supporting cast is populated with good actors who are bogged down by a boring script and the shackles of self-important filmmaking: Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Shepard, and Zooey Deschanel.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick's latest, The Tree of Life, is like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wonder Years on acid. I left the theater with mixed emotions. It was a haunting movie with the kind of breathtaking visual lyricism you expect from a Malick film. He is known for his visual patchworks like Days of Heaven (1978), for which cinematographer Nestor Almendros won an Oscar. But Days of Heaven had problems. Malick emphasized the imagery over the story, which was a love triangle set in the turn-of-the-century wheatfields of Texas. The film was shot in 1976 in Alberta, Canada, and when the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, and Linda Manz) finally saw the movie in 1978, they were shocked at how unrecognizable it seemed. Malick had cut whole scenes of dialogue and what was left was a visual pastiche, beautiful, yes, but also vacant, almost muted. Pauline Kael quipped that it was "an empty Christmas tree" on which "you can hang all your dumb metaphors."  More importantly, Kael observed that "what is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily upon us, but we're not quite sure what it is." Most of the other New York and California critics were more adoring of the movie. However, Malick disappeared from movie-making for twenty years, returning to direct a remake of The Thin Red Line, released in 1998, and then the Christopher Columbus opus, The New World, released in 2005.

I found moments of The Tree of Life completely in sync with Pauline Kael's observations of Days of Heaven. On the other hand, having seen Days of Heaven several times, I was able to compare the two. Malick latched onto a story somewhat more dexterously in The Tree of Life than he did in Days of Heaven. He's always been something of a poetic director, and I think you can only appreciate the kind of image-saturated heaviness he does on a large screen. Watching this or Days of Heaven on your TV will probably kill the movie experience altogether. He's also got a need to be pretentiously philosophical, and show-offy, the way Kubrick was in 2001. The only difference is that Malick's pretentiousness is more out of reverence for the beauty of nature (or perhaps reverence for his appreciation of the beauty of nature) and in 2001 Kubrick seemed to be daring us to be bored/in awe of his technical achievements. He was turning film into opera and demanding that we applaud with reverential deference. Malick might be doing the same thing with nature. Sometimes you think you're watching a National Geographic documentary sans narrator.

But then, about thirty or forty minutes into the movie, Malick calmed down with all the floaty, emotionally manipulative nature imagery (it's beautiful, yes, but it does go on and on) and the visually maneuvered philosophical pontificating about the beginning of the universe and the dawn of life. He zooms in on this middle class, 1950's Texas family headed by the stern, hard-ass dad played by Brad Pitt. He's a proud, stiff-upper-lipped father of three boys. Their mother (played by Jessica Chastain) is all elegance and passivity. She's beautiful and mysterious and genuinely loving, but her spirit is mastered by her rigid husband. He's not without love or kindness, but he seems so afraid of losing his family that he resorts to being a control freak to avoid loss. And so, he alienates them with his domineering temperament. It made you understand all fathers in a fresh way: all at once trying to be brave and tough, tender and buoyant, never really sure of themselves. The boys are trying to figure things out themselves, and the oldest one (Hunter McCracken as a child and Sean Penn as an adult) experiences a loss of innocence that comes with growing up. He learns what death is, he learns the fluid give-and-take of faith when he's told about God and then experiences tragedy for the first time.

Malick can't resist himself though, and he goes back to being cuckoo at the end. By then, though, we're more willing to accept his directorial idiosyncrasies. Besides that, I appreciated the movie's attempt to tell the story visually, relying less on dialogue. And while this technique brings the movie into sometimes new and strange ground, it also made The Tree of Life refreshingly lyrical and offbeat. Sean Penn's presence is virtually a cameo as the oldest son, grown up, trying to make sense of life in the New York business world. He's mourning the loss of his youth, and there's also a heartbreaking story about one of his brothers.

Maybe it's triter than we think. Perhaps The Tree of Life might just be a gag on the audience, trying to whip us up into an ecstatic frenzy. I can hear the pretentious film-goers praising the movie's more esoteric moments as something only the enlightened could understand. I don't think even the director knew what was going on in some of those parts. This would have probably made more sense during the era of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. It's a good film and a bad film, moment-by-moment.

Inglourious Basterds

I finally watched Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Inglourious Basterds, a film that, unlike most historically-themed productions, is blatantly upfront about its historical revisionism. And indeed that is where all the fun is to be had.

While Brad Pitt and his troupe of American Nazi-killing soldiers (incuding Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, Til Schweiger, and Omar Doom) may be the eponymous "basterds," their screen time seems a bit minimal as Tarantino takes us into Paris, where the basterds, in cahoots with a German actress (Diane Kruger) working for the Allies, are planning a show-stopping Nazi judgment day at the screening of a German propaganda film featuring a Nazi soldier (played by Daniel Bruhl) who single-handedly killed over 300 enemy soldiers. Those in attendance include prominent figureheads of the National Socialist German Workers Party, including Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and the Fuher himself, played by Martin Wuttke. Meanwhile, the owner of the cinema (Melanie Laurent), has her own plans of "painting the town."

Brad Pitt's performance is funny, but his sporadic screen time makes it difficult to decide who's supposed to be carrying this movie. Laurent's character certainly has the most fictional backstory and motive. Pitt is just there to crack quasi-ironic jokes in a Southern drawl while his men butcher Nazi soldiers. The story shifts back and forth to different storylines, most of which are fascinating to watch even if they render the movie somewhat discombobulated (and they're not without ample bloodshed). As per usual, Tarantino manages lots of engrossing conversation between his characters, something for which he certainly possesses a knack.

Much good talent is on display here, and the Nazis are successfully represented as slimy, calculating and cold. (But what about the "heroes"?) Christopher Waltz is particularly convincing as the primary villain in this film, a detective working for the SS to track down Jews in hiding, known all over Europe as "The Jew Hunter."

Even if a historian might be mortally offended about how Inglourious Basterds laughs in the face of history, its very audaciousness makes it worthwhile. Tarantino made a lot of people notice him with his debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) and exceeded that with the tremendously successful Pulp Fiction (1994). He really had nowhere else to go but to take something on an epic scale such as World War II and manipulate it into his particular style of gory, violent, loquacious insanity.

Whether or not Tarantino reduces Jews to the same level as their torturers is an interesting question to pursue. Or perhaps this movie is more cathartic than that. ★★★