Memory Play: "Warfare," reviewed.

In Warfare, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (center) plays Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, one the film’s co-directors. (A24)

My review of Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s extraordinary film Warfare is here.

We'll Always Have Casablanca: Allied, reviewed.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as glamorous spies in Allied. (Paramount)

Here's my review of Robert Zemeckis' high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. It's meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious or Carol Reed's The Third Man. Or lesser Graham Greene works, like this one.

The Spoils of War: FURY, reviewed.

This is the scene that makes writer-director David Ayer's FURY something more than just a gritty combat picture.

Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal as the crew of FURY, an M4 Sherman tank.

Logan Lerman is a green member of Brad Pitt's tank crew in David Ayer's FURY.

I expected that David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and the writer-director of End of Watch and Sabotage, would make a gritty World War II combat picture. But I was surprised how much an interest his film takes in the plight of women, and its willingness to show American soldiers behaving badly during the "Good War." My NPR review is here.