One hundred and forty minutes is an awful lot of foreplay for a 10-minute payoff. Yet that’s what Quentin Tarantino is requiring of audiences who commit to his latest film, Inglourious Basterds.

Set in Nazi-occupied France, Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino doing what he does: taking serious and bloody topics and approaching them with a quirky, irreverent eye. The “basterds,” besides being poor spellers, are a group of soldiers (many of them Jewish) with one mission and one mission only: killin’ Naatzis. Naughtzis? Gnat-zees? (It’s tough to phonetically spell Nazis the way Brad Pitt manages to drawl the phrase in the film.)

Just in time for the holidays and the New Year comes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a delicate, thought-provoking film that is surely going to evoke feelings of thanks and hope. It’s not in my nature to be particularly tender, but director David Fincher’s adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story will have even the most cynical [...]