8Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino wrote the story years before revisiting it as a script, he told Filmmaker magazine. “I thought, Okay, maybe I could do it as a miniseries, but let me try to tame this, to make it into a movie.” Tarantino’s World War II characters, both Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of the “Basterds,” and Hans Landa, the chillingly decorous Nazi henchman, function well as ciphers for Tarantino’s fondness for scenes in which horrific violence is preceded by long, anecdotal tangents.