Inglourious Basterds

Released 19 August 2009 by Universal Pictures, three months after its Cannes premiere, Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's Second World War rewritten in five chapters. Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers scalping their way through occupied France, while Mélanie Laurent's Shosanna, the one survivor of the film's opening massacre, plots her own revenge from the projection booth of a Paris cinema, and both roads converge on a single premiere night.

Waltz's Hans Landa opens the film with a twenty-minute interrogation over a glass of milk, and Tarantino stretches every major scene the same way, letting conversations tighten until something snaps. The basement tavern scene turns on a hand gesture, three fingers held up the wrong way. Much of it was shot at Studio Babelsberg outside Berlin. It earned eight Academy Award nominations, Best Picture among them, and grossed more than $320 million worldwide, at the time the biggest of Tarantino's career.