Basterds also set off an audacious new pattern in Tarantino’s career: rewriting the past. In Django Unchained (2012), set two years before the start of the Civil War, a former slave blows up a slave-owner’s house and rescues his own wife, grabbing freedom instead of waiting for history to find him, and Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood also rewrites the story it's based on. We may not know why Tarantino has become so obsessed with alternate versions of previous eras, but we can see the effect. His revisionist histories recast victims as heroes, often linking that heroism to the power of movies.

A director for our times

These fanciful revisions speak to the current moment of fake news and political polarisation. The difference is, Tarantino is not trying to dupe his audiences. He knows that movies can’t change the past, but they can alter how we see it. He is throwing a new light on the present by depicting more just societies that might have been.

Inglourious Basterds works as fantasy – killing Hitler is on everyone’s list of what to do if you could time travel – but its accomplishment as cinema is even more dazzling. The film signals from the start that it is a fiction and an homage to World War Two movies. The theme music, The Green Leaves of Summer, is from the 1960 film The Alamo. The music doesn’t evoke history but war-movie history, and you don’t have to be able to identify that melody to feel how effectively it sets a retro tone.