Quentin Tarantino’s latest work is about Nazis, Revenge, and of course, Cinema. Consisting of a series of vignettes detailing the major players, it arrives at the convergence of two plots to take down the Nazi high command during a film screening in occupied France. Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent) is the assumed name of an escaped French Jew who runs a cinema in Paris with her lover. When a smitten German Audie Murphy counterpart, attempting to woo her, convinces Goebbels to screen his movie in her theatre she spies an opportunity in having the Nazi top brass all gathered in a building filled with nitrate film stock. Meanwhile, when Allied command receives word of the gathering, they deploy an officer (who’s a film critic and expert on Third Reich cinema) to rendezvous with a German double agent/actress and proceed to Paris to destroy the theatre. They are to be escorted by a Dirty Dozenstyled unit of American Jews led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a band of soldiers feared throughout the Reich for their systematic scalping of Nazis.

Hot on the heels of both plots is the singularly most magnificent bastard of the decade, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), otherwise known as the Jew Hunter. An unrelenting assault of wit, cruelty, charisma, and stomach churning terror, Waltz soars above Pitt and Laurent’s magnificent bastards with glee, opposed to the braggadocio of the Yankee and the fetishistic detail on the Frenchwoman. The tension from his excruciating conversational torture reaches right to the core, and his absence from Tarantino’s best scene to date serves to underscore his charming omnipotence when an oh-so-close to equally terrific bastardry ultimately fails to win the day.

Only Tarantino has the chops to get away with presenting holocaust-revenge-porn with the intensity it deserves. I can only wonder what on earth comes next.