Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

38 12 Rounds
48 17 Again
76 Adventureland
48 Angels & Demons
54 Battle for Terra
xx Bruno
80 Coraline
40 Dance Flick
83 Drag Me to Hell
72 Earth
45 Fast & Furious
61 Fighting
34 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
72 Gran Torino
73 Hangover, The
47 Hannah Montana: The Movie
51 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
54 Imagine That
41 Knowing
32 Land of the Lost
56 Monsters vs. Aliens
34 My Life in Ruins
51 My Sister's Keeper
46 Next Day Air
42 Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
54 Observe and Report
25 Obsessed
48 Proposal, The
70 Public Enemies
61 Soloist, The
83 Star Trek
64 State of Play
55 Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
52 Terminator Salvation
35 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
77 Under the Sea 3D
88 Up
43 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
34 Year One

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Signs
Touchstone Pictures


5.8

based on 36 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 148 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some frightening moments

Starring Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones, Patricia Kalember, and Jose L. Rodriguez

Everything that farmer Graham Hess (Gibson) assumed about the world is changed when he discovers a message - an intricate pattern of circles and lines - carved into his crops. (Touchstone Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	M. Night Shyamalan
DIRECTED BY:	M. Night Shyamalan
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: January 7, 2003 Video: January 7, 2003 Theatrical: August 2, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	120 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

If "The Sixth Sense" was Shyamalan's take on ghost stories and "Unbreakable" his ode to comic books, then Signs is the evil cousin to Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Newsweek David Ansen

One of the things that makes Signs such a refreshing summer movie is that it goes against almost all the grains of contemporary Hollywood razzle-dazzle filmmaking -- as did “The Sixth Sense.”

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

Signs blessedly displays a sense of giddy dark humor absent from Shyamalan's previous outings. It appears for much of the film he's merely having fun with the genre, goofing on its paranoid roots.

Film Threat Clint Morris

Shyamalan’s film blends together elements of humanity, faith, drama, tears, tension, terror, humour and the supernatural and succeeds in being one of the sharpest and most exciting films of the year.

Chicago Reader Hank Sartin

Borrowing heavily from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Shyamalan tries to lighten his trademark gloomy tone -- and almost kills the suspense he's working so hard to achieve.

Wall Street Journal Nancy deWolf Smith

Mr. Shyamalan is a new national treasure, as attuned to our sensibilities and everyday life as Steven Spielberg.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

For filmgoers whose idea of a good time is getting the stuffing scared out of them (who are you guys, anyway?), Signs should prove to be time well spent.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Follow Shyamalan's Signs. It will take a piece out of you.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Signs -- though Shyamalan's most visually beautiful work -- seems thinner, barely more than a sketch for a movie, with characters trapped in formulas. Beautifully trapped perhaps -- but paralyzed nonetheless.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Its quirks are exactly what make Signs interesting, entertaining, and good.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

By limiting the number of special effects shots and treating the film more like a horror movie than a science fiction spectacle, Shyamalan creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and keeps the tension level high. There were times during this film when I was strongly reminded of "Panic Room."

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A beautifully crafted, white-knuckle, roller-coaster ride of old-school filmmaking -- the kind that believes that the less you show, the better.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Signs is about God and family, too, but it's also about scaring the bejesus out of you -- and on that level it works like a miracle.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

For a big-budget Hollywood feature, the film places an unusually high amount of stock in the audience's imagination; not since "The Others" or "The Blair Witch Project" have so many shocks been indirect or kept teasingly out of view.

LA Weekly Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

Even if Signs suffers a little from uneven pacing and mismatched tones of reverent homage (to "The Birds" and "War of the Worlds"), soul-searching and silly comedy, the jokes are clever, the tension continual and expertly calibrated, and the performances -- are both deep and moving.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Parcels out information like a triage medic doling out morphine; every tiny bit is carefully considered and then rationed out as though he were terrified he might exhaust his supply before the closing credits.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

USA Today Mike Clark

The movie keeps you watching and, at times, even gripped for more than an hour. But, at the end, it leaves us feeling detached and underwhelmed.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Shyamalan's great gift is the creation of atmosphere, the conjuring of spooky, unseen menace. When he gets around to doing this in Signs, all is well, but it's a tossup as to whether the film offers enough of a payoff considering how long it takes to get where it's going.

Variety Todd McCarthy

All smoke and mirrors. With his third straight excursion into the supernatural, M. Night Shyamalan has begun revealing the hand that works his spooky tricks so much that the lack of substance is plainly seen.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he's dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry. The best surprise ending he could give us in his next movie would be no surprise ending at all.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Once again, the filmmaker gets incredibly wobbly at the end of his story, and his resolution of both the alien incursion and of Graham's crisis of faith feels more like a cheap trick than the product of a genuine belief in anything at all.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Shyamalan has learned from his idol (Spielberg) how to manipulate audience emotion through the intimacy of an ordinary family that is "contacted." But he is even more shameless about it.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.

Slate David Edelstein

As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The film's underlying themes dovetail efficiently with the action but don't generate the emotional gut punch the movie needs; overall it feels padded and logy.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.

The average user rating for this movie is 5.8 (out of 10) based on 148 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Alex Z. gave it a10:
This is a movie about hope. It's tagline for me is "Can it be there are no coincidents?". Some people think that it advocates religion and faith. I think the return of Graham at the end to religion is a plot device and a necessary parabol for everyone else, as we all have hopes and faith, each at different grounds. I felt deeply emotional by the end of this film. A miracle is the final ring of a chain which start from us. Among the most humanist film I've seen.

Ryan M gave it a0:
Horrible Movie. Cheesy and unrealistic. It advertised that it is going to follow the mythology of Earth's encounters with extra-terrestrials. Instead you get a completely shallow suspense film with an unoriginal story. If you want good science fiction you will be terribly disappointed.

Mack gave it an8:
Yes the statement that the director is trying to make is silly and heavy handed. However, his ability to make the events seem like they could really happen and the reactions of the characters play out very realistically before they collapse at the end. The build up is definitely worth putting up with some dissapointment at the end.

[Anonymous] gave it a3:
Brilliant imagery and good directing. However, the plot is so damn atrocious it is hard to believe. Even if you like religious films, it would be hard not to find the ending preposterous. Shayamaylan created a very clever ending to the Sixth Sense and thought he could achieve it again in Signs and The Villiage. He was wrong... 'Swing it!'

David S gave it a10:
A thoroughly under-rated masterpiece. After watching the trailers for this movie, I can see why some people were disapointed. The trailers seemed to have been geared to attract the 'War of the Worlds' fans. However, a lot of peop-le seemed to have missed the raw craft and style with which 'Signs' is executed. To begin with, M.Night Shalamyn's movies scare me the most out of any other movies I have seen. His use of manipulative camera angles, building music, and slow development create some truly memorable moments. On top of this, the back-story is extremely believable, the acting is unique and top-notch, and the musical score is brilliant. It is a very subtle movie, however, so only people who actually like HORROR should watch it, and watch it alone. All you guys who just want to see blood and boobs should watch Hostel or some other piece of garbage with your friends.

Dana C gave it a3:
A tacky morality play packaged in a lackluster retelling of War of the Worlds, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Damian A gave it a10:
These reviews are indeed surprising. This film is a work of genius from the mind of M. Night Shamylan, but it still dissapoints me that his newer works don't have the same gripping, terrifying and awe-inspiring feel.

Signs Touchstone Pictures

Signs
Touchstone Pictures