There is a single moment of love in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s first feature-length film since the Kill Bill series (2003-2004). The film’s two true victims (there are plenty of victim/villains) – a young French-Jewish girl, Shosanna Dreyfus, (Melanie Laurent) whose family is murdered at the film’s start, and a French-African projectionist, Marcel, (Jacky Ido) – kiss.

At that point in the movie, the tender moment feels like a solution. For the better part of 90 minutes, the film has submerged itself in a gruesome world of scoundrels and back-stabbers. But for a moment, as the Jewish girl and African boy kiss, there is hope – hope that this love will birth a resolution to the comic-horror of Inglourious Basterds, hope that in Tarantino’s world, love is still possible.

Don’t worry – Tarantino destroys this hope. Demolishes it, actually, with a great fiery blaze – a movie theater (of all things) engulfed in an inferno, the sound of cackling laughter blaring from the cinema’s speakers, mixing with horrifying screams, the sound of dozens of Nazis dying, mowed down with bullets, slaughtered like sheep. Tarantino brings it all down in such a hyperbolized bloody mess there is really only one possible, though odd reaction to the scene: laughter.

Here, it seems, is the central irony of Inglourious Basterds – an irony Tarantino has played with in all of his films: that humanity shown at its worst self can still be incredibly funny to watch. In fact, laughter is what makes it all watchable, a salve for the scars of our collective souls reflected on screen.

Tarantino’s Basterds is a dense work, a moral tale to be grappled with, and a fantastic good time. It is thickly layered, full of allegories, analogies, and moral vignettes, all of which serve to convolute the story and its apparent themes – plot turning over on itself, mocking itself, the medium rejecting and exalting the medium. Tarantino does seem to forge new ground here. Unlike earlier work, it is less easy to dismiss his world as the product of sick fantasy, built with the visual language of other films, made new with an anxious, fast-talking perversity. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s moral vision has traction; his usual comic-thriller shtick has a new sense of urgency and seriousness. Perhaps it is the use of the holocaust as the setting and motif, but Tarantino’s violence resonates in a new way. We leave the theater asking ourselves, is this really who we are?

There is much to unravel in the film, and it is better off just being seen. If you see only one or two film a year – make this one of them. Brad Pitt alone is worth seeing if only for the laughs. He hasn’t been this fun to watch since Guy Richie’s Snatch (2000). Like fellow tabloid star Johnny Depp, his style thrives on eccentricity, when he is free to clown, spoof, mock, and hyperbolize.

Christoph Waltz, who plays Col. Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter,” is a shoe-in for an Oscar nominee. He is at once creepy and amiable, cool gentility always teetering on madness and rage – a careful balance between gentlemanliness and a frightening viciousness. It is incredible that the past two years have seen two of the best villains on film: Heath Ledger’s Joker in 2008 and now Waltz’s Jew Hunter.

Tarantino is a kind of formalist, like Kubrick. His filmmaking is distractingly meticulous. Inglourious Basterds’ long opening scene is an outright study of the visual language of John Ford and Sergio Leone, both using the references to add meaning to his film and undercut the sources of this analogical inference. Tarantino mixes these filmmakers visions of the myth of the American west. Like Leone, Tarantino’s wild west (only set in France during the second world war) is morally ambiguous, to say the least, and full of Leone-esque characters driven by Machiavellian self interest and skewed visions of glory. Like Ford, Tarantino’s plot is driven by characters strong enough to shape their own destiny and the destiny of society.

In a typical Tarantino convulsion of reference and theme, Tarantino re-sets the famous John Ford shot from The Searchers, John Wayne’s black silhouette outlined in a doorway that looks out into a pastoral countryside. Only in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino places his Jew Hunter there. It is a challenge to all of our pre-conceptions of recent history. Wayne’s character in The Searchers sets out on a chase to hunt down Indian kidnappers. Throughout, Wayne becomes more obsessed and reckless, made nearly mad by his thirst for revenge. Nonetheless, we maintain a sense of Wayne’s humanity and nobility, recognizing the sympathetic Odyssian character of his quest. But now here is the Jew Hunter standing in his place in the doorway. Can we give this character the same benefit of the doubt? Of course not, but Waltz works hard to win our sympathies nonetheless, and Tarantino – his active hand and watching eye never seeming too far off frame – is having a damned good time befuddling our moral assumptions, implicating us in the horror, and rewriting our righteous reading of history.