Poor Angelina Jolie. Before you can sit down and examine the film that marks her debut as a director – a love-hate story set during the 1990s Bosnian War – you must deal with the bricks being thrown at her. During shooting, the Bosnian Women Victims of War Association protested – as well it might – the idea of a film about a Bosnian woman who falls in love with her Serbian rapist. In the Land of Blood and Honey is not that film. Serbian commander Danijel (Goran Kostić) had already been involved with the Muslim Ajla (Zana Marjanović) before the war started. Their affair continues in the camp that Danijel oversees. I can't speak to the copyright-infringement suit brought against Jolie by Croatian author James J. Braddock. But I do know that Jolie does not use the brutal rape camps as a background for forbidden romance. In the Land of Blood and Honey wants to lay the truth out there, about the women assaulted and the men slaughtered. What we see of America is mostly the blind eye it shows to the atrocities. To quote then-Secretary of State James Baker, "We got no dog in this fight." Well, Jolie is at war with that kind of indifference. At times, Jolie rises to the pulpit when she should stay on the ground. Her theme is too complex for her scattered screenplay to encompass. It's as a director that Jolie shines. She gets strong, stinging performances from Kostić and Marjanović. The sexual power plays between their characters barely mask a blood feud that spans the ages. Jolie has a keen eye for the core of a scene and a true director's instinct for the pulse that defines character. Her live-wire movie is out to shake us. That it does.

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“Everything in Its Right Place”

Thom Yorke hit rock bottom the moment he walked offstage after a 1997 concert in Birmingham, England, which initially left him unable to speak and later led him to write the eerie, discombobulated “Everything.” “Lots of people say that song is gibberish,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s not. It’s totally about that” – the mute paralysis that had swept over Yorke after the Birmingham show, which stayed with him through the simultaneous recording of Kid A and Amnesiac. Quoting the song’s repeated line, “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” Yorke twisted his face into a ferocious grimace, explaining, “That’s the face I had for three years.”