Gift, The

Cate Blanchett plays a psychic in the rural South whose visions help convict a local brute (Keanu Reeves) of murder; when continuing visions convince her that the wrong man was convicted, she runs around town telling all the other suspects that the culprit is still at large. For a clairvoyant she’s awfully short of common sense, but then Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson’s script has many such inanities: it doesn’t take ESP to figure out who the real killer is or to see the double-twist ending coming a mile away. Director Sam Raimi lays on the creepy atmosphere with a shovel, trying his best to goose the nonsense up with menace and foreboding. There’s a high-pedigree cast (Giovanni Ribisi, Gary Cole, Hilary Swank, Rosemary Harris, Greg Kinnear) to make it seem important, to little effect.