Hollywood is full of swollen-lipped actresses, but Jolie has the spirit to match those tire-treads.

She burst out of the gate in 1998’s “Gia,” about the glowering supermodel who embodied a new kind of tough glamour and died of AIDS. I remember her blasting through a scene stark naked - sorry, folks, can’t show it! - and admiring her fearlessness more than her body, which is saying a lot.

But Jolie has so large a presence she doesn’t need to pull out the stops or take off her clothes. She can underplay dryly, toying with lines and co-stars, which is why she was so smashing as a sociopath in “Girl, Interrupted,” devastating fellow patients to keep from turning her acid gaze inward. Read more…

The money shot in “Wanted,” its pièce-de-special-effects-résistance and reason for green-lighted being, appears in the opening minutes of this noisy, ultraviolent shoot-’em-up with Angelina Jolie, her many tattoos and some guys. A man has soared onto the roof of a high-rise where he has laid a handful of others to waste. Suddenly the camera cuts to his face as a bullet exits his forehead in slow motion, his skin stretching forward as the projectile tears through it, going straight for the camera and our already numbed skulls.

Well, that’s one way to get the attention of fickle moviegoers, particularly if, like the director Timur Bekmambetov, you’ve got nothing else going for your big Hollywood debut except Ms. Jolie and a couple of ideas recycled from “The Matrix” and “Fight Club.” Mind you, Ms. Jolie has been perfectly cast as a super-scary, seemingly amoral assassin named (wait for it) Fox. Few American actresses, especially those with such pin-skinny arms, can make beating a guy to the ground look so easy and, yeah, man, like fun. With her mean smiley-sneer and snug clothes, her heels and hieroglyphics, she cuts the kind of disciplinarian figure who can bring antsy boys of all ages to their knees or at least into their theater seats. Read more…

This summer an unlikely hero must defy the odds in order to defeat an evil foe and save the land from certain destruction. That hero is large. He’s portly. He has an appetite for destruction, and any other food you might have lying around.

He’s a panda bear. Oh yes — a panda bear. Prepare for awesomeness.

In the animated “Kung Fu Panda,” martial arts maniac Po (voiced by Jack Black) spends his days working in his father’s noodle shop, and his nights dreaming of being a great kung fu warrior. He idolizes the Furious Five – Crane, Mantis, Monkey, Tigress and Viper – the greatest kung fu warriors the world has ever seen. Read more…

For only the second time in his filmmaking career, Clint Eastwood settles on a heroine for his latest celebration of the loner who bucks the system.

Like Hilary Swank’s boxer in “Million Dollar Baby,” Angelina Jolie’s single mother, Christine Collins, takes every punch thrown at her in “Changeling,” and comes back fighting. Her combat is not in a boxing ring — where fighting is supposed to take place — but rather in a corrupt police department, psychiatric ward and the court of justice where she demands to know one thing: What happened to her son?

A true story that is as incredible as it is compelling, Eastwood’s competition entry brushes away the romantic notion of a more innocent time to reveal a Los Angeles circa 1928 awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom. Read more…