Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film[8] written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger and Mélanie Laurent.

The film tells an alternate history story of two converging plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership at a Paris cinema—one through a British operation largely carried out by a team of Jewish American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), and another by French Jewish cinema proprietor Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) who seeks to avenge her murdered family.

The title (but not the story) was inspired by Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Euro War film The Inglorious Bastards, but deliberately misspelled as "a Basquiat-esque touch".

It premiered on May 20, 2009, at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, and received a wide release in theaters in the United States and Europe in August 2009 by the Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures.

In 1941, Austrian SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa interrogates French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite about a fugitive Jewish family, the Dreyfuses.

Three years later, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine recruits Jewish-American soldiers to the "Basterds," a black ops commando unit tasked with instilling fear among Nazis in occupied France by killing and scalping them.

She plots with her Afro-French lover and projectionist, Marcel, to kill the German leaders by burning down the cinema with her collection of highly flammable nitrate films.

British Commando Lieutenant Archie Hicox, a former film critic and fluent German speaker, is recruited for Operation Kino, an attack on the premiere with the Basterds.

Hicox's unusual accent arouses suspicion from Wehrmacht Sergeant Wilhelm and Major Dieter Hellström, and he blows the group's cover with a non-German hand gesture.

Raine tortures von Hammersmark, believing she set his men up, but she convinces him of her loyalty to the Allies and reveals that Hitler will be attending the premiere.

Ulmer and Donowitz break into the opera box, gunning down Hitler and Goebbels and firing into the crowd until their explosives kill everyone inside the cinema, including themselves.

[25] Two characters, Mrs. Himmelstein and Madame Ada Mimieux, played by Cloris Leachman and Maggie Cheung, respectively, were both cut from the final film due to length.

[26][27][28] Quentin Tarantino spent just over a decade creating the film's script because, as he told Charlie Rose in an interview, he became "too precious about the page", meaning the story kept growing and expanding.

[35] After the completion of Kill Bill, Tarantino went back to his first storyline draft and considered making it a mini-series, but Luc Besson convinced him to finish it as a film.

[45] Tarantino originally sought Leonardo DiCaprio to be cast as Hans Landa,[46] before deciding to have the character played by a native German-speaking actor.

[52] The director also wanted to cast Simon Pegg in the film as Lt. Archie Hicox, but he was forced to drop out due to scheduling difficulties with The Adventures of Tintin (2011).

[53] Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender began final negotiations to join the cast as Hicox in August 2008,[53] although he originally auditioned for the role of Landa.

[59] In preparation for the role, Taylor watched dozens of DVDs with footage of Churchill in order to get the Prime Minister's posture, body language, and voice, including a lisp, correct.

[58] Taylor initially recommended British actor Albert Finney for the role during their conversation, but agreed to take the part because of Tarantino's "passion".

[60] In terms of the character's dialect, Myers felt that it was a version of Received Pronunciation meeting the officer class, but mostly an attitude of "I'm fed up with this war and if this dude can end it, great because my country is in ruins.

[63] Filmmaker Tom Tykwer, who translated parts of the film's dialogue into German, recommended Daniel Brühl to Tarantino, who recalled that upon seeing the actor's performance in Good Bye, Lenin!

[93] The trailer features excerpts of Lt. Aldo Raine talking to the Basterds, informing them of the plan to ambush and kill, torture, and scalp unwitting German servicemen, intercut with various other scenes from the film.

[100] In Poland, the artwork on all advertisements and on DVD packaging is unchanged, but the title was translated non-literally to Bękarty Wojny (Bastards of War), so that Nazi iconography could stylize the letter "O".

[104] Though advertising posters and wallpapers may not show Nazi iconography, this restriction does not apply to "works of art", according to German and Austrian law, so the film itself was not censored in either Germany or Austria.

The site's critical consensus reads: "A classic Tarantino genre-blending thrill ride, Inglourious Basterds is violent, unrestrained, and thoroughly entertaining.

The film received an eight- to eleven-minute standing ovation from critics after its first screening at Cannes,[119][120] although Le Monde dismissed it, saying "Tarantino gets lost in a fictional World War II".

[122] Critic James Berardinelli gave the film his first four-star review of 2009, stating, "With Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie since Pulp Fiction", and that it was "one hell of an enjoyable ride".

[123] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times also gave the film a four-star review, writing that "Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he's the real thing, a director of quixotic delights.

[127] Journalist Christopher Hitchens likened the experience of watching the film to "sitting in the dark having a great pot of warm piss emptied very slowly over your head".

"[132] When challenged on his opinion, Rosenbaum elaborated by stating, "For me, Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality.