About a decade ago Robin Williams went through a significant career change, no longer choosing projects that couldn’t be understood by a child of ten. The only way this first feature by music video director Mark Romanek violates this norm is by offering some ambiguity about whether a couple of scenes are real or imaginedthough ten-year-olds who’ve mastered Carrie should sail through them without much difficulty. The tale of a lonely photo-counter worker who becomes obsessed with a family whose snapshots he develops, this watchable if relatively threadbare movie has taken on an undeserved reputation as an art film because of its many festival showings. It’s actually a discreet exploitation effort, the more lurid events being mainly left to the imagination on the apparent assumption that the audience wants to imagine such stuff. The character played by Robin Williams is at best a well-formulated theorem rather than a human being, and the other characters aren’t any more substantial. I was intrigued by the details of how a Kmart-type store is run, but the people in this story could be products on the shelves. With Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole (a bit warmer than the other participants), and Erin Daniels. 98 min. (JR)