WW2 thriller ‘Allied’ is old-fashioned in the best way

The musical score, by Alan Silvestri, has the sadness and portent of the music heard in classic World War II documentaries such as “The World at War.”

There’s a lushness to the photography that feels like a color analogue to the soft focus black-and-white photography of Hollywood in the war years.

Most important of all, “Allied” finds actual movie stars for the lead roles, and director Robert Zemeckis treats them like movie stars, making their faces the locus of all meaning and their interaction the stuff of romantic fantasy.

Coming off of “Allied,” there were rumors that its stars, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, were having an affair during its making.

In the midst of a movie-made romantic atmosphere and depicting the kind of life-and-death stakes that can only intensify an aura of excitement and longing, Pitt and Cotillard make us believe that something is building between them from their first moments on screen.

There’s no better express train to intimacy than posing as a married couple.

The long lead-up to the big event is also the couple’s entrance chute into real emotional closeness, and the very fact that they’re resisting the attraction and fighting the impulse, makes us anxious for them to just give in already.

The combustion finally happens inside an old sedan in the middle of a dust storm, and it might well be the most satisfying movie love scene of 2016.

From that situation — is she or isn’t she, and a loving husband’s desperate effort to prove that she’s not — “Allied” builds a series of tense adventures, as well as two-person scenes between Pitt and Cotillard that are fraught with an underlying urgency.

Cotillard is remarkable, and Pitt does everything a movie star can do, which is what most movie actors can’t do.