Hereafter

Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a San Francisco sugar factory worker who has the gift of chatting with dead people. He used to exploit this fact for money, but the whole damned notion of conversing with the deceased has got him feeling cursed, and he wants to be left alone. Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort is quite a boring affair, with Damon toiling in a film that goes nowhere. It starts out nicely, with a tsunami scene that might consist of the best visual effects ever in an Eastwood film. But things get dreary once they start focusing on Damon’s character and his reluctance to do psychic readings. (It makes it hard for him to get girls.) Steven Spielberg produced this movie, which makes sense because Eastwood’s version of the afterlife looks exactly like the aliens and people coming out of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. All that’s missing is a funky, gangly creature doing hand signals.