STIR OF ECHOES

With clear echoes of M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” David Koepp’s “Stir of Echoes” glides into theaters with a strong, character-driven story that opens with a boy who sees dead people.

But don’t be afraid — “Echoes” may initially seem like a rehashing of “The Sixth Sense,” but it’s its own film. Koepp wisely and swiftly shifts his focus to the boy’s father, Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), a telephone lineman who works and lives on Chicago’s South Side, a tough, blue-collar neighborhood that, in this film at least, is a breeding ground for insensitive jerks.

Based on Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel, “Echoes” quickly becomes a film that takes sensitivity training to a whole new level. At a keg party he attends with his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), Tom allows his sister-in-law, Lisa (Illeana Douglas), to hypnotize him, unaware that Lisa, a hypnotherapist, plans to order him under hypnosis to open his mind.

No one is prepared for the consequences. Almost immediately, Tom’s mind is open to the paranormal. Like his son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), he starts seeing the spirit of a dead girl named Samantha (Jenny Morrison) who is living in their home.

It is how Samantha died that gives the last half of “Echoes” its seamless cinematic verve. Unlike “Stigmata,” which throws everything but a mother-in-law at the screen to give audiences a fright, “Echoes” is restrained; there is never a moment when Koepp isn’t working for his characters or his story. He respects the genre too much to toss in cheap scare tactics such as those found in “The Haunting.”

Instead, just as Kubric did in “The Shining,” Donner in “The Omen” and De Palma in “Carrie,” he is content to tell an absorbing story about people forever changed by the paranormal.

It’s his good luck that he has Bacon in the lead; the actor is maturing into someone to look for. But it’s Koepp’s better luck that he’s released his film smack in the middle of a culture increasingly anxious about what happens after death. Not that we haven’t been there before. The last time was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when those who survived the 1960s and were wondering how they’d ever made it to adulthood looked hard at their lives and decided they wanted to stay around a while longer to see if they’d make it to old age. (Think: Yuppie.)

Still, with Larry King tackling ghosts on CNN, Oprah giving spirits air time on network, Hollywood scoring big at the box office and best-seller lists roaring with books about the beyond, expect interest in death and the paranormal to only increase as we rocket toward another unknown: The end of this millennium.

Grade: A-

THE DINNER GAME

The nasty little game of deceit that’s at the core of writer-director Francis Veber’s latest farce, “The Dinner Game,” certainly is cruel.

In Paris, a group of successful, wealthy businessmen throw dinner parties that have less to do with good food and good conversation than they do with a fiercely competitive game of oneupsmanship: Which man can find the biggest dolt to bring to dinner, someone too numb to realize they haven’t been invited for their good looks or bon mots, but because their stupidity is a source of high entertainment for their hosts.

Veber, who wrote and directed “La Cage Aux Folles,” “La Chevre” and “Les Comperes,” strikes just the right tone here. In spite of its meanspirited premise, his film has a light-hearted charm that has everything to do with its chief idiot, Francois Pignon (Jacques Villeret), a short, bumbling accountant for the Ministry of Finance who builds matchstick models of famous monuments.

The film’s success hinges on Pignon’s relationship with Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte), the dashing French publisher who believes he’s found in Pignon the perfect idiot — until Pignon himself unwittingly turns the tables on Brochant in a series of events that won’t be revealed here. Predictable, but often very funny, “The Dinner Game” serves up the laughs, but don’t expect a leisurely viewing. At only 82 minutes, this film is fast food.

Grade: B+ In French with English subtitles, “The Dinner Game” opens tomorrow at the Railroad Cinema in Waterville.

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News Film Critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on WCSH’s statewide “Morning Report.”