‘Without Blood’ Review: Angelina Jolie Goes Back To Basics With An Artful Wartime Revenge Drama – Toronto Film Festival
deadline.comFor her fifth feature as director, Angelina Jolie has gone so far back to basics that Without Blood could quite easily be her debut.
That isn’t a criticism, rather an observation about how hard it is, even for A-list talent, to make films about the brutality of war, even though many are raging all around us and, by displacing people in their thousands, feeding the anti-immigrant sentiment currently creeping up all around the world.
But even after tackling conflicts in Bosnia (In the Land of Blood and Honey, 2011), Cambodia (First They Killed My Father, 2017), and even the Second World War (Unbroken, 2014), adapting Alessandro Baricco’s 2002 short story of the same name is a bold gambit; it’s a deliberately ambiguous two-hander that will have viewers wondering if they’ve missed a title card or two.
What year is this? And where in the world are we? The two stars are Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir, but if you’re expecting a historical story about either the Mexican or Spanish civil wars, the timelines won’t add up.
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