20 Best War Movies Released Since 2000

5. Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino's sprawling war thriller opens with one of the most chilling scenes of the genre's history: a tense interrogation between a calmly vicious Nazi monster (Christoph Waltz) and an innocent farmer (Denis Menochet) secretly sheltering a Jewish family from his grasp. 

What follows is a twisty yarn filled with detours, as Tarantino's rouge gallery of key players seek revenge, absolution, and the joy they get from killing Nazis wherever they find them. 

Starring Brad Pitt as the leader of the titular Basterds, Nazi hunters wrecking havoc throughout France, and Melanie Laurent as a woman biding her time before striking at the heart of the Third Reich, the film revels in its dark comedy just as much as its gnarly violence and tension. 

Rewriting history with clever genre subversion and gleeful action, Inglorious Basterds finds Tarantino at his best and also his most tender - for all the film's machoism, it's a revealing assessment of the power of grief, the loss its characters have suffered fuelling their need to fight back.