Cinema: Stir Of Echoes

Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) hardly seems the prescient sort. Yet when he is hypnotized at a party, he tumbles into nightmares--or is it another dimension?--harboring fatal secrets. Scenarist Koepp (Jurassic Park) smoothly adapts a novel by Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come) with vagrant similarities to The Sixth Sense. The payoff is relatively small change, but the setup is persuasive: a portrait of a blue-collar marriage in mute distress. And strap yourselves in for the spookiest, most imaginative hypnosis scene in movie memory. You are getting...very...scared.

--By Richard Corliss