CinemaNow - The Village

The scariest thing about The Village may be some of the reviews that it's getting. Once the darling of critics following his The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan has been reduced to a whipping boy with this film. Indeed, New York Post critic Lou Lumenick remarks, A gifted director and visual stylist, Shyamalan's scripts sadly have gotten progressively clunkier. Roger Ebert writes in the Chicago Sun-Times: Critics were enjoined after the screening to avoid revealing the plot secrets. That is not because we would spoil the movie for you. It's because if you knew them, you wouldn't want to go. Discussing those plot twists, A.O. Scott in the New York Times remarks: The last thing I want to do is spoil the fun, meager though it is. As for the surprise ending, Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post comments that it's quite lame, quite tame and quite old. ... I figured it out plenty early, and the 75 percent of you who are smarter than I will get it even earlier. Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News refers to the movie as a genuine clinker and a dreary mess. Joe Morgenstern writes in the Wall Street Journal: Movies don't come much sillier, or slower, than The Village. On the other hand, Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer calls it a hair-raising yarn ... Shyamalan deftly turns a familiar fairy tale into an eerie scary tale. And Eric Harrison in the Houston Chronicle calls it Shyamalan's best film since The Sixth Sense.

much ado about very little indeed.