R. J.

Lebanese writer-director Omar Naïm's debut feature drops an intriguing, provocative premise: in the future, a memory chip can be implanted at birth and record a person's entire life experience, edited after death into a memorial film by a "cutter", described by one character as "part taxidermist, part priest and part mortician" for his ability to absolve the sins of the dead while presenting to the world a perfect facade. Robin Williams plays the appropriately named Alan Hakman, one such cutter, who finds in an editing job an image that sends him back to a childhood trauma and leads him directly into the moral quandaries involved in recording and editing memories that he had always shied away from. Naïm certainly doesn't shy away from those quandaries, but they're about the most interesting things in this debut that looks like a classy studio production, edited by veteran Dede Allen and lensed by Jonathan Demme regular Tak Fujimoto, but feels like a half-baked graduate project, with surprisingly amateurish scripting, acting and handling. Williams' subdued performance (much in the vein of the underrated "One Hour Photo") tries bravely to hold together what ends up as an infuriatingly wasteful mess of perfectly good ideas.

While the title will suggest this latest outing from producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' Dark Castle B-horror stable to be a remake of the 1953 3D classic starring Vincent Price, in effect it merely borrows the title and the central plot point of an eerie museum of far too realistic wax figures, then turns it into a sanitized yet effective "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"-type slasher, complete with backwoods redneck psychos, adroitly helmed by first-timer Collet-Serra, a Hollywood-based Spanish commercial director. Six twenty-somethings out to attend a varsity game in Baton Rouge get sidetracked by a detour and find an uncharted small town that seems suspended in time, its centerpiece a wax museum that is actually built of wax — cue the usual dumb behaviour of twenty-something slasher fodder packs in horror movies, leading to their individual, painful and gory demise. Credit Collet-Serra and screen writing brothers Chad and Carey Hayes for attempting to inject some seriousness and character development into the project — there's an interesting approach to sibling dynamics and the film's exposition takes twice as longer than usual, to properly set the characters up — but, other than an engaging Cuthbert, a brooding Murray and a worthy villain turn from Van Holt, the casting is shallow and the inexistent talent of tabloid star Hilton hinders the film more than helps it. The unnecessarily lengthy running time is partially redeemed by a surreal and truly inspired climactic set-piece that's worth the price of admission alone.

Nora Ephron's hit-and-(mainly)-miss screen version of the 1960's hit TV sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as a witch trying to become a normal American housewife has a marvelously clever twist as its starting point: it doesn't try to adapt the original format, but reinvents it by having as its premise a contemporary TV remake of the original series. The new "Bewitched" sitcom is a last-chance opportunity for washed-out star Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), who accepts to play hapless husband Darrin as long as a complete unknown is cast as Samantha — and Wyatt finds her himself in a bookstore: the lovely and somewhat absent-minded Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), who has just arrived in town in search of love and has never acted in her life. But, just like Samantha, Isabel also happens to be an actual witch dreaming of a normal life... Although Ephron is an old hand at romantic comedy, "Bewitched" never really lives up to the intriguing premise — Ferrell, more of a physical comedian, is painfully miscast, a radiant Kidman looks the part but doesn't seem to be in it, and most of the strong supporting cast goes mysteriously unused (a subplot that sees a charming Michael Caine, as Isabel's caddish warlock father, falling for Shirley MacLaine as her TV mother seems as if it was brutally hacked in post-production, as in fact most of MacLaine's role too). A wonderful sound-stage musical interlude to Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft", shaped as a homage to classic MGM musicals, gives a good glimpse of the magic that Ephron failed to apply to the whole enterprise.