The Adjustment Bureau ***

Director: George Nolfi

Cast: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt

John Slattery, Terence Stamp, Anthony Mackie, Michael Kelly

Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau deals with fate and the forces that shape our every day lives. The film doesn't question the existence of a godlike figure, it establishes there is one (interesting touch for sci-fi) and instead focuses on the bureaucratic processes that said entity uses to maintain order in his plan.

The title bureau in this case consists of men (apparently the heavens have no gender equality programs) dressed in perfect suits and fedoras who are able to freeze time and like race-car mechanics, polish, clean and fix the unaware people who then just keep on living.

No human is ever supposed to see this and the bureau makes sure of that, until one day New York Congressman David Norris (Damon) accidentally runs into one of their interventions. He is warned that if he ever speaks about what he saw, they'll reboot his brain, but worse than that, they forbid him from pursuing the love of Elise Sellas (Blunt) an eccentric dancer he met recently. The film then makes a fascinating turn: instead of becoming a flat out sci-fi thriller, it shifts into a breathtakingly romantic study of humanity's need to explain love.

Sure, the way in which Nolfi bends Dick's story to fulfill his romantic agenda might seem off-putting to some who want their sci-fi to be more cerebral and less sentimental, but the way in which the story is told, without any stylistic frills (despite the genre) makes for a purely classic film aesthetic.

It feels like watching an interpretation of timeless pieces like Love Story or Casablanca, with a twist, yet like the romance movies that endure the test of time, the added genre details aren't necessary to fulfill the film's larger theme.

If you took the sci-fi out of The Adjustment Bureau, you'd still have a wonderful movie, this can't be said of recent films in its vein like Inception, which only dreams it could've mustered the humanity Nolfi injects into this one.

Most of the film's success is owed to Damon and especially Blunt, who achieve a delicious screen chemistry. All throughout the movie you want them to be together and this helps make the audience an accomplice, giving the film a distinctive participatory feeling. Damon squeezes the hell out of his good looks and Blunt is seductively ethereal. Few times in recent films have two leads had the intense chemistry these two have. You really leave The Adjustment Bureau wishing you could follow these two characters for years.

Valkyrie **

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Tom Cruise

Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten

Thomas Kretschmann, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard

It takes but a slight knowledge of history to know how "Valkyrie" will end. The film chronicles the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) on July 20th 1944.

Teaming with high rank members of the German Army Stauffenberg planned a coup that would use the Fuhrer's very own "Operation Valkyrie" to take over Germany and make a truce with the Allies putting an end to World War II.

When the key members of the army are played by character actors like Branagh, Stamp and Nighy the idea of the kind of prestige drama this could amount to would get any film lover salivating.

But when this remarkable team is led by Tom Cruise, it works in a completely different way. Not even attempting to have a German accent, Cruise doesn't make a clown out of von Staffenberg, because we never even get to see past the actor playing him.

Whenever Cruise tries to be serious and muster some sort of gravitas, all we really see is Tom Cruise wearing an eyepatch and trying to kill Hitler.

Rarely has the public perception of an actor affected so much the outcome of an entire movie, but it seems that deep down Cruise has come to terms with the fact that he's a movie star and if you stop taking the film as a serious historical piece and choose to view it as an action thriller the results can be obscenely entertaining.

Singer, who directs like a stock filmmaker under the studio system, just goes with the flow and lets his star shine.

The director's meticulousness is outstanding in the small flashes he let's us see, like the care he has taken in showing us bureaucratic and logistic methods of the era.

Since there is absolutely no regard for character growth and background, scenes with extras and unknown actors in small roles showing the chilling efficiency of the Nazi regime make for a treat.

Singer choreographs the action sequences with just as much care, giving the plot an actual tension even if you know how everything will end.

"Valkyrie" often plays out like an appointed B movie made for propagandistic reasons, after all movie stars were used to draft people during WWII and watching Tom Cruise battling the Nazis, although preposterous and somewhat disrespectful, still is able to engage the audience on a primal level.

When it comes to entertainment "Valkyrie" is an effective, if inconsequential, accomplished mission, as cinema it stays merely as a drill.

Wanted *

Director: Timur Bermakbetov
Cast: Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy
Morgan Freeman, Thomas Kretschmann, Terence Stamp

Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) is an accountant who works in a cubicle with a boss he hates, has a girlfriend who is cheating on him with his best friend and has fifteen dollars on his bank account.
His life is pathetic, "just like yours" as Wesley assumes of the audience as he addresses us.
One day a mysterious woman named Fox (with that name who else could it be but Jolie?) saves him from a man (Kretschmann) trying to kill him.
He later learns that Fox is part of a secret society of assassins aptly called "The Fraternity", led by the mysterious Sloan (Freeman) who reveals to Wesley that the father he never knew was also a member of their society who was recently murdered by a renegade who betrayed them.
Wesley then is trained to avenge his late father and escape his ho hum life.
Members of "The Fraternity" have the special ability to raise their heartbeats to four hundred per minute, which causes an adrenaline rush so high that they can perceive the world around them in a completely different way and can manipulate time and space; power that Wesley had mistaken with panic attacks (suddenly making Woody Allen all the more comprehensible...).
These assassins can jump off high buildings, walk atop moving trains and curve bullets (which is expected to be the "whoa" inducing element for audiences), they have glamorous badass lives and believe they are fulfilling some sort of heavenly deed with their motto that by killing one they can save a thousand.
The visuals are simply stunning and the action sequences constantly push themselves into "what else can they do now?" territory, McAvoy's geekiness makes for a cute Peter Parker sort of thing and Jolie struts her stuff so well that you don't really need her to do much talking (which she curiously doesn't get to do much of either, she justs sits in the back grinning and narrowing her eyes).
But the film's problem isn't its preposterousness (you are after all sitting in a theater watching an Angelina Jolie summer film...), but the fact that it chooses to be so awfully condescending to its audience and then can't muster up the balls to stick to its hedonist view.
Wesley is supposed to be the everyman, a creature extracted from a version of "Fight Club" for the mentally challenged, but as it exploits the sick nature of violence and murder and reduces it to innocent teenage fantasies one has to also wonder what has made the filmmakers so sure that everyone hates their life?
What if there is someone out there who actually loves sitting in a cubicle working numbers? Why do people need to desire extravagant lifestyles as the only outlook for happiness?
Not to be confused with conformism, "Wanted" assumes every member of the audience has a fourteen year old, gun loving, horny teenager inside of them.
One for that matter, that eventually will outgrow this, atone for his sins and move on to an elightened, yet exciting, life.
If "Wanted" had been made in some obscure Eastern European country and was subtitled, people would accuse it of being subversive and inviting people to become murderers, but because it is American, released during the summer and stars Jolie's breasts, it's just seen as harmless fun.