Only a gifted filmmaker could take something as off-the-wall as "Inglourious Basterds" and make it seem like classic movie making. This is director Quentin Tarantino's fevered what-if fantasy about World War II. He brings his depth of film knowledge, his love of the lowly in pop culture, his considerable skills and his willingness to jump from farce to melodrama to the table.

The result is a long, cinematically impressive and entertaining tribute to movies in the guise of a war-movie mission adventure (among other things).

Tarantino worships at the altar of cinema, and this outing may be his most overt offering yet. He incorporates styles that range from spaghetti westerns to film noir to classic French cinema to just about every World War II movie you ever saw. A Paris movie theater is crucial to the plot, a film critic is one of the heroes and an essential character is a glamorous German film star.

Tarantino even uses the work of Leni Riefenstahl, a pioneering female director whose propaganda films for the Third Reich divide film scholars to this day, as a pivotal plot element.

The movie is divided into chapters. In the first, a smooth, well-mannered Nazi colonel comes to a French farmhouse looking for a missing Jewish family. Col. Hans Landa, played with Oscar-winning panache by Christoph Waltz, just about steals the movie. He's smooth, cultured and evil.

Then there's Shosanna, a young Jewish woman who escapes Landa and flees to Paris, where she operates a movie theater. Melanie Laurent is radiant as the movie lover and Nazi hater.

In a plot device straight from 1950s men's magazines and movies such as "The Dirty Dozen," Brad Pitt plays the leader of a desperate mission. He's Lt. Aldo Raine -- certainly a tribute to war movie and B movie stalwart Aldo Ray. Raine, a Tennesse good-old-boy, has gathered a group of American Jews together to infiltrate Nazi-occupied France and scalp Germans. Pitt is a good comic actor, and he brings a wink-wink Appalachian can-do spirit to the bloodthirsty officer -- not to mention some juicy lines.

Then there's the beautiful German actress, Bridget von Hammersmark, played by Diane Kruger. She's a spy for the allies.

When the Nazi high command, including Hitler, plans to converge on Shosanna's movie theater for a special propaganda screening, the good guys swing into action.

Tarantino can sustain tension simply by letting characters talk around a table, and he does that more than once here. He brings out the best in his actors as they banter back and forth while matters of life and death seethe just below the surface.

Much of the movie is subtitled, which only enhances the danger in the air. Tarantino can also erupt into heart-stopping violence, and that occurs as well, though not so much as you might guess.

Tarantino and his crew give the movie a rich, vintage look as the filmmaker swings from compelling drama to farce to shattering action. Even if he flaunts bad taste, brags about his movie knowledge or shouts for attention, Tarantino knows how to shoot a scene.