Angelina Jolie didn’t take it easy on herself when crafting her directorial debut: Instead of picking some low-budget American indie, she scripted a story set during the nineties in Bosnia and cast foreign unknowns who shot one version of the movie in English and another in their native language. The subject matter is even trickier to pull off — though the movie is ostensibly a war-torn romance, it’s one that happens to be between a Serbian rape camp administrator and the Bosnian prisoner he falls for. (Yeah, those don’t usually end well.) To judge from the first trailer, though, Jolie has managed to pull all those disparate elements together in a promising way. She gets high marks already for the degree of difficulty, but let’s wait until December to see how she handles the dismount.
