Allied

Allied (2016) is a spy film set during the Second World War, and its real question is how you can know who the person beside you is. Morocco, 1942. Max, a Canadian intelligence officer, and Marianne, a French resistance fighter, pose as husband and wife for an assassination. The mission ends, they marry for real, settle in London and have a child. Then Max is told: we suspect your wife is a German agent, and you will confirm it. The rest of the film is a man running an investigation inside his own house. Every ordinary moment, every phone call, every visitor takes on a second meaning. Zemeckis makes an open nod to Casablanca; the first half is deliberately shot like the melodramas of that era. The birth scene during the London Blitz appears to be staged as a single take and is the best thing in the film. When it opened, the gossip was discussed more than the film. News of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's divorce broke in exactly those weeks and the press circulated claims of an affair with Marion Cotillard. Cotillard denied it in a direct public statement. The film's box office disappeared under the noise. The final section is predictable but does its emotional work. It runs 124 minutes. Good for: wartime espionage, romantic thriller, and classic Hollywood texture. Less good for: the pace sags in the middle and the digital sets show in places.