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100The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.
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88If "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."
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80Shyamalan’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.
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80Follow Shyamalan's Signs. It will take a piece out of you.
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80One 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.”
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Mr. Shyamalan is a new national treasure, as attuned to our sensibilities and everyday life as Steven Spielberg.
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80For 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.
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80Signs 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.
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80Borrowing 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.
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75Signs -- 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.
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75A beautifully crafted, white-knuckle, roller-coaster ride of old-school filmmaking -- the kind that believes that the less you show, the better.
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75Signs 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.
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75Its quirks are exactly what make Signs interesting, entertaining, and good.
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75By 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."
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70Even 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.
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70For 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.
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70Shyamalan 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]
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67Parcels 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.
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67It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.
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63The 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.
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63The 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.
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60Shyamalan 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.
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60Shyamalan'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.
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60All 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.
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58A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.
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50Shyamalan 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.
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50Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.
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50Once 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.
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50Mr. 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.
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50As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.
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50Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.
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40The 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.
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38Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.
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25It'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.
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25Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.
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10Sitting 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.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 77 out of 124
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Mixed: 14 out of 124
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Negative: 33 out of 124
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10
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8This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.