Looper

Directed by Rian Johnson

(R)

***

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This movie’s time-travel premise will tie your brain into knots, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. But it’s “fast enough, weird enough, and just about smart enough” to make you forget it never quite makes sense. You can tell that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are energized by the challenge of playing the same character at different ages: The former is an assassin who does what a future crime syndicate asks of him—until an older version of himself (Willis) shows up as the next intended target. Before the story grows more conventional, director Rian Johnson “pedals furiously, and largely successfully,” to keep our heads happily spinning. Later plot flaws do not negate “the beauty and mystery” of those scenes, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Daniels makes a “scarily volatile” mob boss, while Emily Blunt is even better as the mother of a youngster who’s destined to become a menacing character himself. Best of all, the final twist leaves no loose ends, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. In fact, it “wipes out the story’s paradoxes so neatly it’s as if it never happened.”