- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
70If the ultimate goal is entertainment, then Lady in the Water enthusiastically rises to the task. In a movie laden with enough symbolism, shamanism and mythic lore to make Joseph Campbell dance a tribal jig, Shyamalan never forgets to have fun.
-
63There is a good chunk of Lady in the Water that is simply too well made and affectingly acted to dismiss as a mere exercise in arrogance.
-
60Shyamalan does project genuine menace and suspense into this mundane location, especially in nighttime scenes. But the magic that would transport you from reality into fantasy is missing.
-
60There is much pleasure to be had watching a born storyteller juggle more balls than even he can carry.
-
58The man has gifts -- but acting and, it's increasingly clear, storytelling aren't among them.
-
50You leave Lady thinking there are still voices in Shyamalan's head well worth a listen.
-
50It lacks the simplicity and resonance of classic fairy tales: It's so muddled and belabored, it's hard to imagine the tykes ever staying awake long enough to hear how it all turned out.
-
50Lady, like all of Shyamalan's movies, is a slick production with consistently interesting visuals... But the story is so convoluted and ultimately preposterous that you're almost embarrassed by the earnestness of the actors trying to carry it off.
-
50Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.
-
50Has the strengths and weaknesses of a one-man show.
-
50The character played by lead Paul Giamatti is a dead-on Shyamalan protagonist: emotionally distanced and something of a train wreck.
-
50Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date.
-
What's odd about Lady in the Water is that for all Shyamalan's histrionics, he's overcontrolled.
-
50One of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.
-
50Unfortunately, this narf's a drag: she talks like a fortune cookie and doesn't really do anything. Still, the multicultural cast is fun, the images have a painterly beauty and there are some beguiling comic touches before the story sinks into a swamp of solemn metaphysical glop.
-
50It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.
-
42Shockingly misconceived, poorly executed effort.
-
40There are moments of great beauty throughout (the film was lensed by Wong Kar-Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle), and Shyamalan's heart is nowhere if not on his sleeve, but even these moments cannot steer Lady in the Water clear of its director's zealously over-earnest pretensions.
-
40Lady in the Water feels very much like something its author made up as he went along; and, if it weren't so damn weird, it would most certainly put you right to sleep.
-
40I will hold against him (Shyamalan) that Lady in the Water isn't scary, that its own inner logic breaks down at countless points along the way, and that its ending is disappointingly literal and just plain stupid. Lady in the Water is, however, funny at times, even intentionally so.
-
40Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.
-
40A ponderous, self-indulgent bedtime tale. Awkwardly positioned, this gloomy gothic fantasy falls well short of horror.
-
The film is a rogue hunk of hooey.
-
38The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography.
-
38This is sloppy filmmaking, and it's likely to wipe away whatever luster still remains to Shyamalan's reputation.
-
38This isn't nitpicking. Every bit of the tale is as full of holes as a wool sweater at a moth convention, and Shyamalan telegraphs each potential surprise.
-
33If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.
-
30Lady is more of an ensemble picture, and truly the Cove is the most ethnically diverse and community-minded apartment complex in the continental United States.
-
30Challenges us to believe in the power of myth. But the big challenge here is surviving the tedium of Shyamalan's meandering inventiveness. What's supposed to be fanciful storytelling is really just audience punishment.
-
30There is something bizarrely compelling about the movie. It's slower than watching a train wreck but invokes that same level of disbelief.
-
25A charmless, unscary, fatuous and largely incoherent fairy tale.
-
25Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.
-
25I suspect audiences will see Shyamalan's portentous doodle for what it is - the height of arrogance and a bad night out at the movies.
-
25It comes off as tedious, pretentious, self-indulgent, talky and so garbled it might have been improvised by the actors.
-
10It's as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self-serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he's lost his mind.
-
10This cloying piece of claptrap sets a high-water mark for pomposity, condescension, false profundity and true turgidity -- no small accomplishment for the man whose last two features were the deadly duo "Signs" and "The Village."
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 148 out of 209
-
Mixed: 14 out of 209
-
Negative: 47 out of 209