Cinema saves the world in writer/director Quentin Tarantino's disjointed history-bending homage to war movies. The multi-stranded plot includes Mélanie Laurent as a Jew avoiding Gestapo capture, Brad Pitt as a lieutenant commanding a dirty dozen of Nazi hunters and Diane Kruger as a German movie star/British double agent. All of which eventually roll into the main action: to blow up the Nazi High Command at the Paris premiere of one of Goebbels's propaganda films. Delivered as a series of witty dialogue-driven vignettes containing flashes of violent action, it's a long but entertainingly showy melodrama full of cineaste jokes, tricksy wordplay and references to film-makers GW Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl and Sergio Leone. Highlights include a resistance-bar rendezvous where English spy Michael Fassbender's Nazi-officer disguise is gradually penetrated, and Christoph Waltz's turn as a charmingly evil SS colonel. Meanwhile, on the superb soundtrack, recycled Ennio Morricone collides with the likes of David Bowie.

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.