NEW YORK — Once upon a time, Quentin Tarantino made hip, crackling-dialogue crime capers, pulpy character dramas, and martial arts revenge films. In the past half decade, he’s gotten serious. Well, at least as serious as this blood-and-guts-obsessed filmmaker may ever become.

In his Oscar-nominated 2009 hit, “Inglourious Basterds,” and his latest cinematic provocation, “Django Unchained,” Tarantino dared to tackle two of the most painful chapters in recent history, the Holocaust and American slavery, by creating genre-blending revenge stories filtered through his cinema-soaked mind.