Unbroken , out Thursday, is a biopic war drama based off the 2010 book by Laura Hillenbrand about Olympian Louis Zamperini and his time as a prisoner of war in WWII Japan. The film marks Angelina Jolie ’s second outing as a director, inspired by her interaction with the real-life Zamperini, whom Jolie discovered was her neighbor after reading Hillenbrand’s novel. Unbroken may be in the running for multiple Academy Awards including best picture and best director. The Hollywood Reporter’s chief film critic Todd McCarthy writes, “What Jolie succeeds in doing to a substantial degree is representing her hero’s physical ordeal and his tenacious refusal to give up when it would have been very easy to do so. What she and her more than estimable quarter of screenwriters — Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson — have not entirely pulled off is dramatizing the full range of Louie’s internal suffering, emotional responses and survival mechanisms. Nor have they made any of the secondary characters pop from the anonymous background of prisoner extras.”
