Grade: B-

Verdict: Worth seeking out on a cold winter weekend if you're in the mood for some scares.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

"Hide and Seek" stars Robert De Niro, "X2's" Famke Janssen and, most especially, Dakota Fanning, probably the best under-10 in the business today. Yet it's being released in the dreaded January dead zone.

What's wrong with this picture?

Not as much as the studio apparently thinks. A nifty little thriller with some effective psychological and supernatural flourishes, "Hide and Seek" deserves better than being dumped in the bleak black hole of midwinter that's typically reserved for movies that never should have been made or movies that never should be released or both.

De Niro stars as Dr. David Calloway, a mild-mannered Manhattan psychologist who whisks himself and his young daughter, Emily (Fanning), away to live in isolated upstate New York after a family trauma. Hoping a change of scenery will bring about a change in Emily's moody, withdrawn behavior, he's initially pleased when she announces she has a new friend, Charlie.

But just who is Charlie? Is he an imaginary friend? And if so, is he like poor little Linda Blair's imaginary friend, Captain Howdy, in "The Exorcist," who started out so jolly and ended up making her spew pea soup?

When angry, blood-red graffiti begins appearing in the upstairs bathroom and stuck windows mysteriously unstick and Emily's favorite doll turns up mutilated in the trash can, David grows more ap- prehensive. Could Charlie be their bereaved and unbalanced neighbor whose little girl was just about Emily's age when she died of cancer? Most chilling of all, is Emily doing these things herself?

As beautifully played by Fanning, she could be. Gone is the bubbly and adorable kid from last year's "Man on Fire." In her stead is a watchful, somewhat sullen child whose lank dark hair, vampire pallor and huge circles under her eyes suggest Christina Ricci in the "Addams Family" movies.

Fanning keeps us emotionally connected to the movie, even as the ending goes on too long and the various supporting characters show up with "Hi, I'll be your next victim" all but stamped across their foreheads. And De Niro is working hard as well Ñ for the first time in years, it seems. ("Analyze That" anybody? How about "Meet the Fockers" or "Shark Tale" or "Godsend"?) Perhaps Fanning's freshness and concentration have brought out the old De Niro. Or maybe he doesn't want to be out-acted by a 10-year-old.

It's easy to call the movie derivative as echoes of everything from "What Lies Beneath" to "The Shining" drift by. But it delivers more often than not. And though you may guess Charlie's identity, it really doesn't spoil the movie. It just makes it interesting in an entirely different way.