"Allied" may be a calculating WW2-era romance, but it's hard to care when the film is so marvelously effective.

Allied, a World War II-era romantic thriller starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as spies from Canada and France, is a film with a split personality. In the first third or so, Allied plays like a conventional adventure-romance, something akin to Casablanca—and indeed the movie makes obvious references to the great Bergman and Bogart love story, such as the fact that it’s set in Casablanca in 1942. But then the film shifts in tone, becoming something darker and more somber for our spy-heroes, after fate twists their fake romance into a real one, and questions of nationality and loyalty become blurred in the name of love.

The movie opens with a hell of a shot: Brad Pitt, as Max Vatan, a Canadian spy working for British intelligence, parachuting onto the Moroccan desert. Pitt knows how to make an entrance, and the scene feels like something out of a James Bond. Upon arriving in Casablanca, Max quickly finds Marianne (Cotillard), who’s lunching with some French and German friends, all of them Nazi sympathizers. Marianne introduces Max as her husband, a character for whom Marianne has already amassed an array of details, even taking the time to furnish a wardrobe for him. Max is happy to play along, even beyond the typical calls of the job. That night, on the roof of their apartment, Marianne kisses Max, and the act of playing at love ignites the real thing. Of course, their mission also fuels their passion: Nothing binds two people together quite like assassinating a Nazi ambassador: Allied accepts the premise of every Bond movie that espionage is an aphrodisiac.

But Allied isn’t a James Bond movie. Director Robert Zemeckis, working from a script by Stephen Knight, goes for our emotional jugular, an act which is both cruel and satisfying. As a protegé of Steven Spielberg (who in his early career especially could transmute pop into art that moves us), Zemeckis instinctively wants to give us an emotionally big thriller, and the movie goes down some dark passages to fulfill that desire. Zemeckis lunges for significance with big themes and big emotions. You may feel like you're being manipulated, and yet, that may be half the fun.

Brad Pitt's performance jostles between effective and insufficient. At times he lacks the equipment to handle the emotional ups and downs of Max Vatan's life. However, at 53, Pitt is in terrific shape, and he's still convincing when he brandishes a machine gun or pilots an airplane or punches somebody's lights out. And to Brad Pitt's credit, he doesn't resort to histrionics, as though he were forcing himself into a more emotional performance, when a scene turns dark. Instead he turns stoic, like a pillar of marble. And maybe that's the right instinct of a star who knows his strengths and his weaknesses.

And then there's Marion Cotillard, dark and brooding, who also evokes that Old Hollywood star quality, and who has a vivid, almost palpable spark of life inside her. Cotillard commands our attention with those dark eyes and red lips and her somberly romantic expression: She can appear tragic even when she isn’t; she's alluring, deceptive, mysterious, like a modern-day Ingrid Bergman, so how could anyone--including Brad Pitt--resist her? In a sense, Pitt belongs in the first version of this movie, the one that keeps the tragedy of the war at an arm’s length; Cotillard, we sense, has been living inside the other movie all along, waiting for the tables to turn.

But the two work marvelously well together, fortunately, and even if Robert Zemeckis is a calculating director, meticulously assembling all the right elements, his stars twist the material back into something with heart. Zemeckis smartly knows that we must care about them in order to care about this movie. His calculations pay off, too, when the relationship between Max and Marianne collides into worldwide conflicts, like in a tense party scene at their home in suburban London, in which the city is besieged by a Nazi blitz, and a German fighter plane turns into an infernal torpedo and descends right toward their house. Never has the blitz felt more terrifying to someone who wasn't alive when it actually happened. And if Allied is calculating and cruel, it's also magnificently entertaining and, in the end, sobering.

With Jared Harris, Matthew Goode, Lizzy Caplan, Anton Lesser, August Diehl, Simon McBurney, and Camille Cottin.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

For years, my adult self looked back on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) with fondness. It was a movie I watched fairly regularly, and it shared a VHS space with George Romero's Day of the Dead. (In those days, my parents taped movies off television, and we had hundreds of them, three to a video-cassette tape.) Well, having just re-watched Roger Rabbit for the first time in probably eight or nine years, I must report that I no longer feel the same affection for this movie. This time, I was struck by the fact that it's noisy and chaotic and not as entertaining as it used to be.

The director is Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), and Steven Spielberg co-executive produced the film, which was made by his production company, Amblin. And yes, it's some kind of an adult tribute to cartoons, from the old to the new, from MGM to Warner Bros. to Disney. The effects of intermingling live action and animation were, of course, something else a quarter-century ago. Today they're a bit dated, but the film is still watchable in that sense.

The plot is taken out of some 1940s L.A. noir. A washed-up, boozing private eye named Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is hired by a studio executive to take some lewd photos of a cartoon named Jessica Rabbit (uncredited voice of Kathleen Turner, who was the Lauren Bacall of the 80s) in flagrante delicto with Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), the owner of Toontown, which is exactly what it sounds like. When Jessica's husband the daffy Roger Rabbit sees them, he becomes infuriated. Next thing you know, Marvin Acme is bumped off, and Roger of course becomes the prime suspect. The obvious culprit isn't Roger, though. It's the ominous and clearly malicious Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who has big plans for Los Angeles as it finishes out the 1940s.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is designed to keep the kiddos interested. And with that, the filmmakers lose no opportunity to keep things flying at you. There's barely a moment to catch your breath. When the film slows down and allows Bob Hoskins to actually dominate the screen, it becomes more watchable. He's a marvelous actor who commands the screen when he's allowed to. He looks like Ed Asner: a lovable bear of a man, whose British accent occasionally slips out, generally when he's shouting.

Hoskins is paired off with Joanna Cassidy, who plays the no-nonsense bartender Dolores, his girlfriend who's too realistic to be bowled over with ideas of romance or being swept off her feet by her has-been of a beau. Cassidy doesn't have much room for character growth, but she's able to convey a lot just by the way she stands with her hands on her hips, or in the way she pronounces Eddie a failure with a look or a simple gesture. These are the kinds of actors you need in a film like this, where no one is particularly interested in the acting. All the eye candy is on display to titillate us, so why would we ever care about something so drab as performances? They make it palatable.

As the voice of Roger Rabbit, Charles Fleischer doesn't fail to inject a certain madcap genius into his vocal performance. But Roger grates on the nerves: he's the annoying sidekick who keeps ruining everything for the hero, and the fact that he's constantly trying to steal the show and be cute didn't endear him to me this time around.

There are lots of familiar voices popping up, as this isn't the kind of movie that's content to let the humor or the excitement build of its own momentum. It's all shoved into our faces at break force speed, with director Zemeckis seemingly screaming, "SEE? ISN'T THIS GREAT STUFF?!" You'll find: Betty Boop (Mae Questel), Bugs Bunny and various other cartoon characters performed by Mel Blanc. With Lou Hirsch as Baby Herman, David Lander as the Judge's right-hand-weasel, Alan Tilvernas R.K. Maroon, and Richard LeParmentier. Amy Irving sings "Why Don't You Do Right" as Jessica Rabbit. Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. 104 min. ★★½

Used Cars

It's a comedy about rival used car dealerships somewhere in the Southwest, run by constantly fighting twin brothers (both played by Jack Warden). Used Cars (1980) has some clever ideas in it, but as a comedy goes, it's lazy. The funny scenes are never particularly focused, and they don't develop the movie. It's episodic and haphazardly conceived, and then there's a race-against-time kind of finale tacked on at the end to try and maneuver the audience to root for the characters--and the movie--when both have just fumbled through the motions for nearly two hours. That's one of the biggest problems for this movie: it has a breezy style that seems contradictory to its ugly production values and its cynical sense of humor. (This is, after all, a comic exhibition of the worst of consumer culture: the junkyard.) I think it's an intelligent movie, but one that hardly deserves to be called a comedy. The comic scenes are never as funny as they are intended to be, and when the movie goes for cheap laughs (such as a car model's clothes being ripped off during a commercial that's preempting a football game), you feel like you're being played down to a little bit.

Kurt Russell is believable as one of the used car dealers, who's always trying to lure unsuspecting customers across the street and away from his competitor. In one scene, he fastens a ten-dollar bill to the end of a fishing line and casts his net across the street. The ending is somewhat enjoyable, but it comes too late, after the movie has gone on too long, and the characters never quite gel. It's almost as if the writers--director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale--were too familiar with them to bother to flesh them out for us. With Gerrit Graham and Frank McRae as Russell's assistants (who were my favorite characters in the movie), Deborah Harmon, Joe Flaherty, David Lander, Michael McKean, Michael Talbot, Al Lewis (who is very amusing as a judge), and Dub Taylor. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg. 113 mins. ★½