Can a chance meeting with a beautiful girl change your life, and hers? Maybe, unless the mysterious men from the Adjustment Bureau decide otherwise, according to this intriguing fantasy romance/thriller based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Matt Damon plays a brash, aspiring New York politician who’s smitten when he meets Emily Blunt’s sexy dancer/choreographer in a hotel bathroom. They kiss impulsively and passionately but then go their separate ways.  But Matt is apprehended by two guys in grey hats and suits (Anthony Mackie and John Slattery), who had been shadowing him. He’s informed he wasn’t supposed to see Emily and must avoid her or “we’ll erase your brain.”

Why? Well these guys are charged with ensuring certain people follow their destinies. Matt, of course, believes in free will more than someone else’s idea of fate. He meets Emily again after a youthful indiscretion derails his political career, and a chase ensues. Damon and Blunt are an appealing couple and Terence Stamp bobs up to explain how the Bureau works. Writer-director George Nolfi (who scripted Ocean's Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum) cranks up the suspense but leaves several plot holes.   
 

This fascinating film wants us to believe it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a young New York photographer who’s contacted by an eight-year-old girl in Michigan who appears to be a preciously talented painter. The girl, Abby, sends Nev Schulman a painting of a dancer inspired by one of his photographs that was published in The New York Times. Via Facebook, texts and phone calls, Nev befriends Abby, her half sister Megan and their mother Angela. Nev quickly becomes infatuated with the flirtatious, hot-looking Megan but his suspicions are aroused when he discovers that songs she’d supposedly written were actually composed and performed by other singers and posted on YouTube.

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Nev’s brother) accompany Nev as he heads to Michigan to meet the family, including Angela’s husband Vincent, with surprising consequences. Truth, so the old saying goes, is stranger than fiction and this film has the ring of truth- but how much of it is it real? I’m not sure but I do think it’s a clever parable about what can happen when online relationships crash headlong into the reality of face-to-face encounters.
 

Just how good is Jeff Bridges as a grizzled, alcoholic, washed-up country & western singer in this rousing, warm-hearted drama from first-time writer/director Scott Cooper? Good enough to earn his first best actor Oscar as Bad Blake, who’s 57, been married four times and spends his life on the road singing in dumps like a bowling alley bar. Not a great romantic prospect but reporter Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a single mother with a cute four-year-old boy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, takes a shine to Blake after she interviews him. Colin Farrell plays a country singing star, a former protégée of Blake’s, who challenges him to end his creative drought and write some new songs for him to record.

Bridges is totally believable as a guy who sings wistfully, “I used to be somebody, but now I'm somebody else,” and builds a great rapport with Gyllenhaal as they show their characters' growing affection for each other despite encountering several bumps in the road. Will the footloose Blake finally find some contentment with the sweet but vulnerable Jean and get his life and career back on track? It’s well worth watching to find out.