White Noise Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, a widower whose late missus is reaching out from the Great Beyond, but there's nothing at all scary about White Noise, which goes bump in the night so often it's easy to mistake it for clumsy. An infomercial for something called Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which supposedly allows you to hear the dead through untuned radios and TV sets, this isn't terribly scary and doesn't make much sense either: Jonathan doesn't hear or see just dead people on his TV screen, but live people too, right before they meet their maker. The presence of Keaton allows the most forgiving filmgoer to view White Noise not as a supernatural thriller, but as a sort of comic-book movie to be taken lightly. There are odd allusions to Batman, and, like Bruce Willis' reluctant hero in Unbreakable, Jonathan discovers he has the power to rescue the doomed, rushing to car accidents and abandoned warehouses glimpsed on the monitors. Don't think this was the point, but whatever; it's nice to see Keaton, regardless. --Robert Wilonsky
