The enlistment of Nora Ephron, director and (with her sister Delia) cowriter, assures a level of smartness unexpected in a transplant from the small screen to the big. Not at all a reasonable facsimile of the Sixties sitcom about the witchy housewife with the twitchy nose, it is rather a backlot Hollywood satire about an attempted revival of said sitcom. This angle of entry affords the critic an occasion to trot out an adjective such as "self-reflexive" or a prefix such as "meta-," if he feels comfortable with such terms; and it affords Ephron, a woman with her nose to the wind and her ear to the ground, an occasion to take jabs at the barrel-scraping creative poverty in modern Hollywood and at its needy stars and their currying handlers. (Inasmuch as this nonremake, or meta-remake, is at the same time a kind of remake after all, the actress cast in the part of the television witch happens to be a bona fide witch: "She's incredibly dialled in," exclaims one of the producers at the audition.) Brightly photographed by John Lindley, leavened with judicious special effects, cleverly constructed for changes of pace and changes of course, the film truly does correct the imbalance in the old TV show, giving the male character equal weight, or at any rate equal attention, with the female. But the cost of making him an object of ridicule -- and of casting Will Ferrell, that master of overstatement, in the part -- is to diminish him as a subsequent object of romance. And bit by bit, as the film shifts from jabs to clinches, it loses some of its distance -- some of its difference -- from the TV series. In the final tally, the film can be said to have delivered everything it promised: glib, flip, hip observations on power, illusion, loss of self, and other common ingredients in romantic relations. Everything it promised, and more. Not as much, let's say, as the witchcraft comedy nonpareil, Bell, Book, and Candle. But a lot more, certainly, than the wisp-of-smoke sitcom from which it takes its name. With Nicole Kidman, Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd