This is a gratifying movie that, unlike anything a Jewish filmmaker would produce, depicts the hunting and slaughter of Nazis without the slightest bit of apprehension. An American Jew would do Nazi-hunting with scenes of angst-ridden moral introspection. Tarantino does Nazi-hunting right, with panache and confidence.

But I have one complaint, and it is not really about this particular movie but about the entire genre of films in which the Nazis are presented as purely evil and those who pursue them as purely good. These films seem to be the only way that the concepts of good and evil can find expression in our popular culture today, and they come at the expense of our ability to distinguish good and evil here in our time. When President Bush called the perpetrators of 9/11 “evildoers,” he was condemned with eye-rolling and derision by enlightened people everywhere. What a simpleton to speak in such terms!

Yet one does not hear complaints from the same people as Brad Pitt carves swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis or when any number of other films depict World War II in Manichean terms. Inglourious Basterds in isolation is a tremendous movie, morally and cinematically. But it comes, like all films of its genre, at the expense of our current struggles. What would truly be brave is a film that places al-Qaeda and the U.S. military in such stark moral categories, or, God forbid, the IDF and Hezbollah. But that would require a difficult and unpopular acknowledgment from our filmmakers, that evil exists in the present and not only in the past.

Update: A friend passes along a quote from Johannes Gross, a German writer: “The resistance to Hitler and his kind is getting stronger the more the Third Reich recedes into the past.”