In the closing years of this century, organized crime syndicates have a problem with the standard tactic of threatening to kill someone for not cooperating because it appears that every person on Earth is tracked and can't die without leaving vital information about their death behind. By a lucky coincidence, however, it turns out that time travel has been invented and while it quickly becomes illegal, it does offer a rather neat solution for the elimination of these undesireables: send 'em into the past, where bad things can happen without leaving those awkward traces. Better yet, have people poised and ready to kill them as soon as they pop out of the future, "loopers". 

The main character is a Looper named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who exists 30 years in the past (2044) who is supplied with specific details of when others will be sent back, where they'll be at the precise moment they appear, and what to do: kill them immediately upon arrival. Conveniently, each has silver bars attached to their bodies, meaning that once they're dead, the looper gets paid. Disposing of the body's easy too as Joe works in a rural area.

Like any other job with the mob, loopers get snuffed out too, for a variety of reasons. To retire a looper, the mobster simply sends the older self back through the time portal with a hood over their head: the younger self then kills the older self without realizing ("closing the loop"), then figures out what's happened and knows that they have thirty years to live, after which point their death has already happened ("will already happen"?). There's a huge paradox here, but let's skip it, along with the question of why sending someone back in time defeats the tracking system but that, say, encasing them in concrete doesn't.

David Norris (Matt Damon) is a young go-getter New York politician who has a chance encounter with the quirky, engaging Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a ballerina who captures his attention immediately. But strange forces are at work and Norris is assaulted and wakes up in a warehouse, surrounded by mysterious dark-suited men in fedoras. Their leader is Richardson (John Slattery), who explains to Norris that there's a Plan, as mapped in their constantly changing notebooks, and that he cannot be with Elise in The Plan.

The film transforms from a romance into an action film once the watchers show up, and while fate keeps causing Norris to bump into Sellas, it becomes clear that if he's going to try to exercise free will and pursue her, he's going to do so at the risk of the Bureau wiping his memories to avoid dangerous ripples to The Plan. Offsetting the mysterious and sinister watchers is Harry (Anthony Mackie), who sympathizes with Norris and helps him learn what's going on and how to wrest back control of his own fate.

I found The Adjustment Bureau an interesting and thought-provoking thriller, rather slow to get started but very worth watching. Blunt is splendid in her role as a modern dancer confused by all that's going on and I found Harry a particularly sympathetic character, a man torn between his duty to the Bureau and his emotional connection with Norris. In an age where so many science fiction films are about alien invasions or other violent stories, it was a pleasure to have a more cerebral film with snappy dialog and a good cinematic payoff at the end.

Gulliver's Travels was exactly the kind of film where this proved important, because there were many times during the screening of this sophomoric movie that I cringed, even as the majority of the audience laughed or cheered. The example that stands out is when Gulliver (Jack Black) first arrives at the miniature kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging palace fire by dropping his shorts and urinating. That's the level of sophistication that scriptwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller targeted in this crude adaptation of the splendid Swiftian story from the early 1700s.

Black is mailroom clerk and general shlub Lemuel Gulliver, the least important employee at the New York Tribune. He's in love with travel section editor Darcy Silverman (Amanda Peet). After straight-arrow new hire Dan (local Denver comedian T.J. Miller) goes from Gulliver's sole employee to his boss in a single day, Gulliver fumbles an attempt to ask Darcy out by instead applying for a travel writing assignment. His assignment? Head down to the Bermuda Triangle and unearth its secrets.

Thus begins a ridiculously improbable sequence of events that lands him on the island of Lilliput, a place where everything is 1/12th normal size, including the daft love triangle of Princess Mary (Emily Blunt), pompous General Edward (Chris O'Dowd) and imprisoned commoner Horatio (Jason Segel). The story is so predictable that the only pleasure in the film is the special visual effects, and they are impressive, done by the effects team that created the far more entertaining Night At the Museum movies.

I'll be blunt: Gulliver's Travels isn't worth your time unless you're a fan of either Jack Black or computer graphics. I wouldn't even rent this unless you're entertaining a basement full of teen boys. Black has the ability to make smart, thoughtful comedies, but it's been a painfully long time since Be Kind Rewind and King Kong.