Cross-index: "Apartment obsession, shifting identities, horses and goats (but no small animals), fake documentary within a fiction film, ghosts."

Reporting on the kidnapping of Mr. Pearl has been prone to inaccuracies, in part because so much information has come via e-mail - a medium in which people can shift identities and addresses and disguise their electronic whereabouts with a few keystrokes.

The main riders, in a plot that shifts identities by the minute, are a surprisingly naive publicist (Gene Wilder) and a baffling blonde (Jill Clayburgh).

Her cast of characters, shifting identities as effortlessly as the models of Manet, is family and friends.

Berlin, he thereby suggests, is unique in our century for the accretion of so many conflicting memories in its buildings and monuments, several of which have shifted identities to an astonishing degree through successive regimes.

R. Mixing dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities and intimations of doom, David Lynch's film has a sense of perversity that echoes his "Blue Velvet."

Keeping track of the companies has been a challenge, Mr. Barbera said, because they shift identities, shedding each Web site as it gains a bad reputation.