20 Greatest Opening Movie Scenes Of All Time

6. Inglourious Basterds

Much like Quentin Tarantino's other films, Inglourious Basterds (the director's 2009 tribute to war movies) wastes no time at all in creating the tensest atmosphere possible, focusing the action on a farmer in northern France as he protects Jewish fugitives from the Vichy government and Colonel Hans Landa's SS brigade.

The palpability of the scene's tension is made clear right from the off, with Ennio Morricone's score implicating a sense of tragic inevitability even before Landa has arrived.

Christoph Waltz too is utterly unsettling as the Austrian, and while the audience is allowed to think - for just one second - that he's unaware of the men and women hiding underneath the farmer's floorboards, it's made clear that he knew all along. It makes the back and forth between the Colonel and his victim all the more menacing, with the scene coming to an end in a hail of gunfire and in the miraculous escape of Mélanie Laurent's Shosanna Dreyfus, who assumes a new identity in Paris shortly afterwards.

It's the catalyst that triggers Dreyfus' quest for revenge, and while Tarantino doesn't bring all of Inglourious' individual stories together until the film's climactic (and bloody) final act, the opening confrontation with Landa lingers throughout, eclipsing the Colonel's other heinous transgressions through to his scarring at the hands of Aldo Raine in its closing moments.