20 Most Rewatchable Movies Of The 2000s

13. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

There’s not an entry in Quentin Tarantino’s filmography that doesn’t invite, or in many cases, demand rewatching, and yet the noughties were an uneven period for the director. Following his unimpeachable record of crime movies in the nineties, Tarantino was given the keys to the kingdom (the kingdom here being mid-to-high eight-figure budgets) and allowed to do what he wanted. And what he wanted was an enormously long retro martial arts movie that had to be split in two, a neo-Grindhouse picture passion project that not that many people went to see and, of course, Inglourious Basterds.

The alternate history war film puts US Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his company of Nazi-hunting jews into action in Europe, mid-World War II. Hunted by SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the Basterds must pull out every stop (and pull off every scalp) in order to kill Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke) in Paris. It’s bloody, it’s brutal, and it’s unlike anything else Tarantino or any other big director was doing this decade.

Vying for the place of the director’s best film, Basterds makes an easy watch, despite its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. It manages to subvert the classic war film formula, it uses every trick from the Tarantino playbook, and it knows how to have fun, with plenty of laughs, set-pieces, and fast-talking scenes to keep things kinetic. And we’d be lying if we said we didn’t like watching Hitler get blown away again and again and again.