Sweet revenge suffuses Quentin Tarantino's astounding revisionist World War II epic. Expectedly reverential of cinema, Basterds follows a group of male vigilantes on a dangerous mission. In an audacious genre twist, the tough avengers are a Jewish special forces unit assembled by Brad Pitt to infiltrate enemy territory and kill Nazis. A French cinema owner (Mélanie Laurent), whose Jewish family is wiped out by a sadistic colonel (Christoph Walz), plots her own vengeful finale that converges with the Basterds, offering one of the most fascinating, complicated episodes of catharsis in modern cinema.