Inglourious Basterds

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

(R)

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A Holocaust film in which Jews kick Nazi butt

Quentin Tarantino may have made his “masterpiece,” said Christopher Kelly in The Kansas City Star. “A kind of revisionist World War II history,” Inglourious Basterds strives to rewrite not just the “rules of cinema” but history itself. The Inglourious Basterds are a unit of American Jews, led by non-Jew Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who take on the Nazis to rescue their kinsmen. Watching Tarantino’s stylish violence applied to righteous ends proves “as cathartic as it is comic, as powerfully exuberant as it is unexpectedly poignant.” In most World War II films, Jews are victims, but Tarantino here is “handing” self-determination back to them. He might think he’s doing Jews a favor with this “revenge fantasy,” but he couldn’t be more wrong, said David Denby in The New Yorker. His pipe dream of an altered Holocaust is “ridiculous and appallingly insensitive.” The history was real, and the feelings we Jews have about it are real, said Daniel Mendelsohn in Newsweek. For filmgoers to indulge in such fantasy “at the expense of the truth of history would be the most inglorious bastardization of all.”