Unremittingly cute, and on a couple of occasions actually funny, this supernatural romantic comedy adds a new wrinkle to the conventional ghost story, and new rules (anything goes) into the bargain. The new wrinkle is that the previous tenant who haunts a breathtaking San Francisco apartment as an intermittent apparition, visible only to the current tenant, is not technically a ghost at all, merely the disembodied spirit of a workaholic young doctor in a three-month coma. Because this previous tenant, female, had had no social life prior to the coma, and because the current tenant, male, is a withdrawn widower, a happy ending heaves into view at the same instant as the new wrinkle. Reese Witherspoon, assisted by some seamless passing-through-solid-objects effects, has sufficient artifice to make herself right at home in the situation. But Mark Ruffalo, though he can play befuddlement, which will come in very handy, is not by any stretch an acceptable romantic-comedy lead; and Jon Heder, in search of life after Napoleon Dynamite, proves to be no longer an extraordinary geek, only an ordinary one, as a dilettante occultist. Directed by Mark Waters. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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