Category Archives: Reviews

Into The Abyss Film Review

German documentary film-maker Werner Herzog [Grizzly Man and his most recent documentary on cave art in France, The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams] takes on a macabre American Gothic-esque tale of death and life. It is equal parts Capote’s In Cold Blood and an expose on the no-less-grisly underside of capital punishment. A particularly timely movie in light of the recent Troy Davis execution in Georgia, Into The Abyss turns the lens on a triple homicide case in Conroe, Texas. Teenagers at the time of the crime, the movie centers on Michael Perry and Jason Burkett ten years later—Burkett is sentenced to life in prison and Michael Perry is facing execution.

While documentaries are inherently “biased” in that they present a position, Herzog’s approach is fresh and interesting. The focus is not on the issue of guilt or innocence—as such, it is not a who-done-it crime procedural. There is no confusion on Herzog’s personal opposition to the death penalty, but as an interviewer, he has an uncanny way of educing visceral, evocative, and unexpectedly eloquent responses from his subjects. For example, when he asks how “something feels,” rather than drawing bafflement, he elicits trenchant answers such as when he asks Jason Burkett’s wife to describe what his hand feels like over hers or how it felt for Jason’s father to be chained next to his son or when he asks the prison chaplain to “please describe an encounter with a squirrel.” His interviewing style, at worst is a bit unsettling, but for the most part, is surprisingly disarming. Into The Abyss makes copious use of police video of the crime scene, as well as footage of what the execution room looks like, grimly named “The Death House.” The interviews with the surrounding characters are what really offer some truly unique perspectives and pack an emotional punch. The segment with Jason Burkett’s father, who himself is serving a prison sentence, is especially poignant. His plea to the court at the sentencing to “please do not kill my son” is a stark and haiku-like encapsulation of just what capital punishment means at its most uncomplicated—taking away a human life.The segment with Fred Allen, a captain in the Death House unit, who after unstrapping his 125th prisoner from the gurney could not bring himself to do it one more time is especially powerful in its insider perspective on the “process.” His conviction that “no one has a right to take a human life,” is cogent in the context of seeing the damage his work did to him and his transformation from a man simply committed to “carrying out the law in a professional manner” to one who could not physically or emotionally continue to do it.

Into The Abyss also does an excellent job of portraying the milieu of violence that haunts the small Texas town, appropriately entitled the “dark side of Conroe.” As such, it also reminds the audience that capital punishment is meted out to people of different backgrounds. It’s a bleak reality—generations of families in prison, rampant violence, struggling working class, gated communities…Jason Burkett’s father, serving a sentence himself, blames himself, explaining how his son never had a chance. When he describes the moment when they were handcuffed together in the same prison bus, he heartbreakingly narrates that he felt like a “total failure as a father, being there with my baby son. Doesn’t get any lower than that.”
The film’s pacing seems reflective of the complexity of the thorny issue of crime and punishment, yet steers clear of dogmatic asides, opting to simply present things as they are. The daughter of the one of the victims describes that she was shocked to see that Michael Perry was “just a boy” and not the monster she had imagined him to be, yet she feels like a weight is lifted off her shoulders when he is executed—her words are a small example of just how slippery the idea of retribution and, even more so, justice is.

Into The Abyss does a tremendous job of humanizing such a broad, firebrand issue as the death penalty. It manages to steer clear of normative polemics or moralizing, instead opting for a subtle view into what it actually feels to take away a life.

Little Dragon Concert Review

My review of the Little Dragon Concert, 10/29

Saturday’s sold-out Little Dragon show at the 9:30 Club was an exuberant, percussion-propelled, lush feast for the senses—a ritual union, if you will, presided over by the high priestess of unbridled soul, Yukimi Nagano.

The band and the crowd swelled with a riotous, jubilant energy that is so rare to see at most concerts. Yukimi Nagano literally bounded about the stage in her impossibly adorable, pixie-sprightly way, cutely bantering, dancing even more than the crowd, and contributing to the percussion-heavy sound with her tambourine and drum pad-playing.

One could hardly imagine a more unlikely candidate for a “jam band” than an electro-soul-downtempo outfit, yet Little Dragon’s show had a funky, beat-happy sensibility that was positively soul-stirring and authentically organic in its pure celebration of just playing for an audience. It’s through this dogged dedication to their live show that Little Dragon has built such a huge following, without a “big fancy record label,” as Nagano put it.

Nagano has lent her unique vocals to a number of tracks, including the Gorillaz’ “Empire Ants” and “To Binge,” SBTRKT’s “Wildfire,” and DJ Shadow’s new “Scale It Back.” From her old days in singing for downtempo-neo jazz band Koop (whose hit single “Waltz For Koop” appears on almost all chillout compilations), Nagano has a knack for infusing the songs with a soulful vibrato that keeps the ears guessing and sets her apart from other figure-head female vocalists—she is a musician in every sense of the word. She was definitely the epicenter of the show and she did it with an effortless and impossibly infectious flair.

Little Dragon played the ebullient title track “Ritual Union” off the new album, as well “Little Man,” and the dubsteppy-glitchy “Precious.” There were also tracks off their previous two releases including “Feather,” “My Step,” “Never Never,” and “After The Rain.” Interspersed with occasional jam sessions, the band stayed away from their more atmospheric, melancholic tunes and kept the tempo up and the dance sensibility more prominent. Only their final song “Twice” hinted at their more somber material, and Yukimi’s vocals took on an ethereal, almost other-worldly quality.

In a word, the show was the perfect embodiment of a band-crowd synergy that builds and truly doesn’t leave an unmoved soul or body in the crowd.

Margin Call Review

My movie review of Margin Call for Brightest Young Things.

Margin Call is essentially the fiction counterpart to the scathing documentary condemnation of Wall Street hubris, Inside Job. Err, except that it is actually based on all too chillingly real story—48 hours in the life of a investment firm during the 2008 meltdown. In that sense, the tension is psychological but no less thrilling, and unlike Wall Street and Boiler Room, it does away with the aggrandization of the macho-centric “old boy network” and slicked-back-hair-swagger of the financial world. J.C. Chandor’s debut, featuring a star cast including Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, and Jeremy Irons, attempts to humanize what are essentially two-dimensional caricatures in the public consciousness—the Wall Street “fat cats” and their trader underling whiz kids. It’s a film that raises more questions than it answers, as it should be—it’s a trenchant commentary on the nebulousness of the word accountability and morality or right or wrong in the paper world of money–literally.

Zachary Quinto plays a young risk management wonk, with a Ph.D. in rocket science no less, who, after some late-night number crunching, “discovers” that the firm is leveraged beyond historical limits and that at current market volatility levels, it is looking to incur losses greater than its value. The big guns are called in, including the CEO [played with appropriate Euro-trash bluster by Jeremy Irons] who literally helicopters in to weigh in with the decision on how to offload the toxic assets pronto. Kevin Spacey turns in a spectacular performance as a world-weary trading floor boss on who falls the burden of doing the dirty job of selling worthless instruments. His character in particular is extremely interesting and nuanced—he resists management’s “sell something worth nothing” plan not from a moral high ground but from the perspective of a veteran salesman—“We are not in the business of selling. We are in the business of buying and selling. And we only sell stuff that we know people will come back for. No one will trust us again.” In his amoral, strange, yet stoically samurai-esque way, he has loyalty to the firm—not its CEOs and not the market. He is also not oblivious to the cut-throat nature of their business—after a particularly brutal lay-off of 80% of his traders, he advises the ones left behind that their co-workers are “not to be thought of again.” His exchange with Quinto’s character on whether selling the assets is “the right thing to do” really encapsulates the message of the whole film–“For whom?” “I am not sure.” “Neither am I.”

Margin Call deserves credit for shining a light on a really broad scope of the Wall Street milieu. For example, the firing of Sarah Robertson, Demi Moore’s risk management character, while her male counterpart stayed on hinted at the chauvinistic nature of the business. The dialogue between the junior staff about their being glorified computer junkies and about this being a game of “one guy wins, one guy loses,” as well as the “f*** normal people” nihilistic ethos of the business was nicely and subtly portrayed. The CEO’s assertion that it “wasn’t brains that got [him] here” were a cheeky comment on the current discourse on the Wall Street fat cats. The hookers-and-blow excess also added a realistic touch to the picture.

Considering that we are still in the midst of the economic quagmire that Margin Call alludes to, the film nicely manages to avoid running into the “too soon” category. No Ph.D. in Economics required, it aptly presents the situation for what it is—with no easy answers, while steering clear of the blatant and vapid money-worship of older financial thrillers like Wall Street. The characters are fallible and complex—some are American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman-esque, some, like Kevin Spacey’s character, are downright likable. In other words, it takes the fairly dehumanized version of the investment banker bad guy and at least attempts to explore him, even though humanization, redemption, or understanding is not exactly easy to come by either.

Ladytron Concert Review

My review of the Ladytron show on October 11, 2011 at the 9:30 Club for Brightest Young Things:

Liverpool-based Ladytron’s electrifying show at the 9:30 Club was exactly what one would expect from a band that literally started the electroclash movement and heavily influenced an entire generation of bands like Empire Of The Sun, Holy Ghost, Royksopp, Yelle, and Client, to name a few…and practically the entirely neo-electro movement, in truth. It would not be an exaggeration to put Ladytron’s legacy near New Order’s—you know you have longevity in the flash-in-pan electro scene when you can release a greatest hits album of ten years, like Ladytron has. While some of their contemporaries like Miss Kittin and Felix Da Housecat and the electroclash movement as a whole lost its luster in the pop-music zeitgeist, Ladytron continued their reign by consistently putting out excellent albums. A decade-long career and five stellar album releases later, Ladytron proved equally relevant and original [stodgy “forefather” label be damned] as when they first introduced their synth-driven electropop sound.
Since the days of Kraftwerk, it is no big secret that it’s pretty hard to make knob-twiddling and keyboard-button-pushing sexy or particularly thrilling live—it’s the nature of the beast when it comes to electronica. Ladytron’s live show, however, was a really interesting mix of light and well…magic. The band and a well-executed light show were the only components yet they proved more than ample. Lead vocalist Helen Marnie was channeling some sort of a Princess Leia-meet choirgirl-meet nun white get-up, while Mira Aroyo resembled a beautiful porcelain doll. The combined effect was something best described as “demure/pneumatic babydoll chique.” They weren’t going for “sexy” but it was mannequin hot nevertheless—thrilling you with chillness?
The band opened with “Ghosts,” “International Dateline” [whose refrain, “International dateline; let’s end it here” was particularly modern and apropos in its sentiment] and with a new song called “Mirage” off their September-released album, Gravity The Seducer. Helen Marnie was doing the majority of the vocals, in a Jane Birkin-esque lilt, which isn’t always the case on their albums where the two vocalist share in their efforts. It wasn’t until “True Mathematics” that Mira Aroyo stepped away from her very concerted synth-operating duties to deliver an adorably-cute Bulgarian nursery-rhyme vocal on the song. As a fellow countrywoman, there is no doubt that Mira is, by FAR, the coolest and greatest Bulgarian export, period—and no, don’t groan about how there are no other Bulgarian exports! It is especially endearing that so many of the Bulgarian lyrics she sings are all either snippets from old folk rhymes or are very haiku-esque and sparse, yet she delivers them in this brilliant stern-detached-school-marm-way that works so perfectly. No wonder the Bulgarian contingent in the audience last night chanted, “Mira, ti si super!” [Mira, you are the best!].
The energy continued to build with Ladytron’s performance of their hits—“Runaway,” “Ace Of Hz” [both off their more recent releases], “Discotraxx,” and “Seventeen.” The song’s “They only want you when you are 17, when you are 21, you are no fun,” was a cheeky commentary on the length of the pop culture attention span nowadays. They also performed “White Elephant” off the new album and “Little Black Angel” from their greatest hits album. The show ended with a raucous performance of “Destroy Everything You Touch” that was especially apropos—sonic destruction of awesomeness abounded.
The show was a testament to what has kept Ladytron going through an entire decade with such sustained success—their music might be machine-made but it has always remained organic and melodic despite its method of creation. While knob-twiddling and button-pushing has become the norm, they’ve always kept their hand on the human pulse.

CREEP-None More Noir

My feature on CREEP at The Vinyl District Blog

Brooklyn production duo CREEP sound like the lovechild of She Wants Revenge and Poe, with some of The xx and Garbage thrown in for good measure. You can finally feel good about breaking out the dark eyeliner and gothing out without having to reassure yourself and others that you are being meta, tongue-in-cheek, or subversive about it, and you are not really a [closet] Goth. [Is there such a thing as a non-closet Goth, btw?] Well, raise the black flag, my friends, and trash that VNV Nation record because CREEP are here to meet all of your needs.

CREEP are producers/DJs Lauren Flax and Lauren Dillard. Flax is an internationally-renowned house DJ and producer—one of her bigger recent hits was “You’ve Changed” with Sia on vocals. Her experience as Fischerspooner’s tour DJ clearly lends itself well to CREEP’s creepy synth-driven sensibilities, but the group’s sound is indelibly ethereally beautiful even through the cold mechanics of a foundation.

CREEP’s spectral debut single “Days” featuring The xx’s Romy Madley-Croft came out earlier this year. The refrain of “Are you thinking the same things I do?/ I been thinking about me and you/ My nights are turning into days/ But I don’t know since everything changed” is really descriptive of the ethos of CREEP’s music. Nights turn into days, dreamscapes unfold, miasmas shimmer in and out, lost souls find and lose each other, love and loss are different sides of the same coin. There is lots of smoke and mirrors, and reality is too tenuous to look for.

The follow-up “You” is a stunning showcase of R&B superstar twins Nina Sky’s interweaving vocals. The video, under the genius direction of Thalia Mavros, could not be a more apt visual piece for the song. If there ever was a video that lives and breathes chiaroscuro, this is it. Shadows fall away and take over—what is black or white, is there even an answer… Faces fade in and out. You will probably notice some very Shining-esque shots and maybe even an homage to Asian horror. Either way—it’s hypnotic, sinister, and terribly engrossing.

DFA’s Planningtorock recently released the remix of “You.” Check it out and get the MP3 where it premiered on RCRD LBL .

Don’t let the upcoming full-length release creep up on you—the record will grab you with a vengeance.

Tokimonsta Feature

I have started writing for the Vinyl District blog! Check out my first feature–Tokimonsta.

Trip hop has long been a turntablist’s game, even if the most obvious examples you can think of are Geoff Barrow’s scratching on Portishead’s “Only You” or the seminal DJ Shadow Endtroducing. In the early 2000s, artists like DJ Krush, RJD2, Nujabes, and DJ Vadim continued to carry the torch, despite public opinion that “trip hop was dead” or relegated to Buddha Bar compilations. It is in this vein that LA-based producer TOKiMONSTA (Jennifer Lee) makes her pastiche of beats and samples.
Tokimonsta cut her teeth on a myriad of fresh remixes with a signature sound—anything from Tweet’s “Call Me,” to Lykke Li’s “Little Bit” and Telepopmusik’s “Breathe.” She released a ton of mixtapes and toured, paying some major dues in the process. Her diminutively adorable moniker terribly apt, Tokimonsta is a Godzilla on the wheels of steel and clearly knows more than a thing or two about crate-digging, scratching, and creating really naturally flowing sample soundscapes.
The Creature Dreams EP finds Tokimonsta on an even more consistent course with her sound than her last full-length album, 2010’s Midnight Creatures. “Bright Shadows,” “Little Pleasures,” and “Darkest[Dim]“ are three of the standout tracks on the EP, and they feature singer Gavin Turek. “Day Job” is another equally beautiful track—as a whole, the album is consistent in its excellence and is very un-California-esque in that it’s late-night listening alright. It is not a dark record—it’s maybe moderately melancholy in its dusty vinyl ambiance, but it is easily one of the best and most consistently “trip hop” albums to come out in recent years. Definitely worth a spin!

DC Muslim Film Fest 2011

DC Muslim Film Fest 2011

The Muslim Film Festival held in Washington, D.C. from April 19th to 27th, 2011 and organized by the American Islamic Congress and Project Nur presents a diverse group of five films under the general rubric of Generation: Muslim. Considering the fact that an estimated 65% of the world Muslim population is under the age of 30, the films embody a youthful, vibrant ethos and offer a glimpse into a world that is quite removed from the plucked-from-the-headlines “angry young Arab man” stereotype—simply put, they show that subversive is not equal to “angry mob.” The protagonists in the films break dance, play in indie rock bands, paint graffiti, throw punk rock shows and, in general, provide quite refreshing, nuanced, and trenchant answers to the question of what it means to be a Muslim. To an audience bombarded with images of the Islamic world’s troubled relationship with Western culture, the Muslim Film Festival paints a picture of diversity and narrates how Islam fits and lives within the social fabric of Western settings.

The 2009 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize selection No One Knows About Persian Cats explores the difficulties Iranian youth face in trying to produce and perform rock music—it’s a breathless expose on a cat-and-mouse game but the movie does not take on a fatalistic, cynical view of that. If anything, it shows that even under repressive regimes, there is such a strong undercurrent of creativity—case in point, Iran has metal and indie rock bands, too, and even Sufi musicians who have to record their music underground.

The Tunisian Making Of is an interesting meta-approach-taking film-within-a-film about the making of a film about the radicalization of youth. It frames in a rather innovative way the question of just how that could take place.

The 2010 Oscar Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film Un Prophete, screening on Wednesday, April 27, is a tour-de-force thriller of a young Muslim man’s experience in a French prison and his alliance with the Corsican mob.

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival selection The Taqwacores, directed by Eyad Zahra, depicts the electrifying underground subculture of Muslim punk-rockers in Buffalo, NY. Based on the Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2003 cult novel The Taqwacores, the movie does an incredible job of portraying the ultimate in-your-face punch of the mashing of two “counter-mainstream-cultural,” if you will, phenomena—being punk and being Muslim in America. Zahra’s direction is superb in showing us that the characters in the movie are not on some contrived faux-rebellion tip against society—if anything, they are simply living only as they know how and accepting in a sort of resigned, almost cynical way that simply being who they are by definition makes them subversive. As the pink-mohawked guitarist Jehangir (Dominic Rains) puts it, he is the embodiment of “mismatching of disenfranchised subcultures.”

In addition to the absolutely stunning cinematography [the movie’s cadence is really unique and true to its ’80s zine-punk aesthetic], the cast of characters is thrilling to watch—there is shy Yusef (Bobby Naderi), an engineering student, ever- angry, moral-enforcing straight-edger Umar (Nav Mann), and Rabeya (Noureen DeWulf), a burqa-wearing feminist-of-sorts, whose attire baffles even her roommates but who Jehangir simply sums up as “must be the kind of girl who reads in a burqa.” When Jehangir decides to put on a punk show, hosting Muslim punk bands from “Khalifornia,” [the soundtrack of the movie features those real bands, btw], things get ugly in a good and bad [punk] sense. The Taqwacores is also full of clever, funny dialogue such as Jehangir’s description of the chastity battle as a “jihad against my nuts.” Ultimately, the theme is that even through the rebellion and struggle, there is an ever present thread of faith and spirituality–“Allah is too big and too open for my Islam to be small and closed.”

Director Eyad Zahra commented that, “I was not certain that this film would be ‘Islamically-accepted’ but there has been no negative response to it. It has seen nothing but good.” If there is any message, he expounded, it is that “the Muslim community is wide and diverse.” The paradigm of “big tent” underscores the very pluralistic nature of Islam and the DC Muslim Film Fest’s film selections showcase both the struggles and triumphs of being Muslim in a modern context. The take-away message from the Festival was that through the struggle of defining one’s identity in a subcultural vs. mainstream sense and even with the difficulty of discrimination and repression, the “performance” of a Muslim identity takes many different forms and in the process raises a series of incredibly interesting questions.

Happythankyoumoreplease Review

Happythankyoumoreplease Review
The title of “Happythankyoumoreplease” is quite apropos — you will leave the theater grateful and wanting more of its offbeat charm. If you are already groaning at the prospect of yet another contrived indie rom-com à la “500 Days Of Summer” or the movie version of “Friends” or the millennials’ answer to “Singles,” you will find yourself pleasantly surprised.
In “Happythankyoumoreplease,” director, writer and star Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”) forgoes the hipper-and-more-clever-than-thou approach in favor of an unassuming, natural dialogue and genuinely likable characters. And if there is such a thing as a New York “vibe,” the movie captures it spot-on.
The lead character, Sam (Radnor), is an aspiring novelist on the way to a meeting with a publisher who meets a boy named Rasheen (Michael Algieri) who gets separated from his family on the train. As a plot vehicle, Rasheen and Sam’s relationship is meant to assure us of Sam’s inherent goodness despite his ne’er-do-well, seemingly rakish lifestyle, delivering some of the more heart-warming, cute lines in the movie.
For example, Sam labels his suburban angst-free childhood as hardly “Dickensian” or conducive to writing the great American novel. Or when Sam discovers Rasheen’s art talents, he laughs at Rasheen’s drawing of him as a “dashing Russian aristocrat.” These sort of exchanges abound and make the movie terribly endearing with a low cheese factor.
The other characters are equally compelling. Mary Catherine (Zoe Kazan) and her boyfriend Charlie (Pablo Schreiber), who try to decide whether or not to move to Los Angeles, which Mary calls the “epicenter of all that is awful.” Sam’s best friend Annie (Malin Akerman) is bemoaning her unfortunate choice in men, (dating “29-year-old 12-year-olds”) when she meets a seemingly dorky co-worker who seems to constantly hang out on her floor at work because “philanthropic giving is the cool place to be.”
Annie tells this story of an Indian cab driver-would-be-guru who advises her that a good way to perpetuate more gratitude in the universe is to simply say, “Thank you. More please.” Albeit hokey as far as mantras go, it’s veritable enough for hippie-esque Annie, who in the end gets over her abysmal dating streak and allows herself to be wooed by the uncool Sam #2.
Then, there is Sam’s love interest, waitress and cabaret singer Mississippi (Kate Mara), whose refusal to sleep with Sam due to her New Year’s avowal to “not be a whore” leads to their impossibly-cute three-day-stand/move-in session, complete with a hand-written contract and key exchange.
The characters in “Happythankyoumoreplease” feel very realistic with no tacked-on, contrived idiosyncrasies for entertainment’s sake. It’s definitely a feel-good movie, but not in a mawkish, fake sense. In the end, the characters all end up working through their various conflicts, but the resolutions are not fanciful and unrealistic.

The Adjustment Bureau Review

The Adjustment Bureau Successfully Blends Romance, Sci-Fi

Grade: A

Can one outrun one’s fate? The Adjustment Bureau answers that question quite literally. Based on the short story “The Adjustment Team” by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, the film is a sci-fi-tinged romance not unlike Gattaca or Code 46 in its ethos, and despite its fairly gravitas subject matter, it is incredibly entertaining and captivating in its human angle.

Matt Damon stars as a rising political star/Senator candidate David Norris, whose chance encounter with a contemporary modern dancer Elise [Emily Blunt], sets him on an inexorable path. Elise’s character is instantly lovable—she is irreverent, ebullient, and free-spirited. David has a reputation for being a “loose cannon,” but under her influence, he loosens up instead. So, their romance begins until David encounters the men of the Adjustment Bureau, who tell him, “You peeked behind a curtain you weren’t supposed to know exists.” Apparently, it is not according to the “plan” for David and Elise to be together. Even though the plausibility of the level of ardor they have for each from just a few encounters requires a leap of faith, both Damon and Blunt play their roles perfectly and their on-screen chemistry carries the storyline well. There are a couple of silly moments, such as when David is to be prevented from seeing Elise dance by the Adjustment Bureau because he will instantly fall in love with her if he does [gasp—he does], but these minor hiccups do not detract from the overall enjoyability of seeing their relationship grow.

Director George Nolfi’s [Ocean’s Eleven, The Bourne Ultimatum] portrayal of The Adjustment Bureau as fate’s company men is incredibly amusing and easily makes this movie worth seeing for that alone. The use of corporate speak—e.g. the higher being is “The Chairman,” “angels” are “case officers,” “briefcases” are interventions—is really clever and apt in building the mythology. The various adjustments, calibrations, and irregularities are very reminiscent of “glitch in the Matrix” motifs and accessible to the viewer [no elaborate sci-fi mumbo jumbo here]. The droll, English-men-like bureau men have serious jobs, but they certainly have a sense of humor. The dapper bureau men are powerful but not omnipotent—as Harry, one of the bureau’s men who comes to David’s aide explains, it’s all science. They have an interest in making sure humans do not screw up too much, but they cannot read their minds or watch everyone at all times and can only predict outcomes based on the percentage of weights options-ha! Therein lies David and Elise’s out—there is margin for irregularities, chance, and the big one, free will.

The Adjustment Bureau is a thrilling film with just the right mix of sci-fi plot elements and a strong human story—it is clever and funny, without being overbearingly technical or requiring extreme suspension of disbelief.