A few detours into director Robert Zemeckis's trademark sentimentality aside, Allied could easily be a romantic war drama recently rediscovered from the 1940s, perhaps one inspired by Casablanca. There’s certainly a wonderfully old-fashioned feel to the tale of the Canadian intelligence operative (Brad Pitt) and the French resistance fighter (Marion Cotillard) who team up to assassinate a Nazi official in French Morocco ... in, yes, Casablanca. A year later, they have married and are living in London when their loyalties are called into question by the RAF, to which he is seconded. There are a few good bits of stuff blowing up—the sequence in which a damaged German bomber slowly falls from the skies over London is full of exquisite tension—but the action of war mostly takes a backseat to the emotional turmoil that inevitable occurs when spies whose lives depend on the success of their lies must trust one another, if they can. Zemeckis judiciously balances psychological and physical suspense, and ends up with an elegant potboiler that does seem to hail from a cinematic era when silences heavy with suspicion spoke louder than words. By MaryAnn Johanson