Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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Rust and Bone (De Rouille et d'os) (2012)

A woman who loses her lower legs in an accident and a down-and-out man not doing a very good job of raising his son end up coming together and forming a shaky, mutually beneficial alliance but their paths to more stable lives are morally and physically challenging and the hardships they face almost too much to bear - almost.

★★★★☆

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Allied (2016)

The second half of the second act becomes momentarily clumsy as the film rushes some necessary information while at the same time Brad Pitt's stoic intelligence officer, faced with the idea his wife is a double agent, starts making emotional rather than cool-headed-agent decisions - and Brad Pitt's woodenness is appropriate for the stoic stuff but doesn't quite support the emotional - but otherwise this is a ripping, well-acted romantic spy yarn told in a really very sumptuously presented wartime Morocco and London.

★★★★☆

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