The single star is because the setup is fine — almost great, even. Estranged father and son (Will and Jaden Smith) survive a crash landing on a hostile planet. Dad's injured, and so it's the son who must retrieve an emergency beacon from a distant chunk of wreckage. Technology will …
Denis Villeneuve’s latest is an artier — certainly moodier and less entertaining, thanks to Amy Adams’s deeply inward protagonist and a blue-gray palette designed to contrast the barren present with the fruitful past — version of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. That is, it’s an alien-landing movie in which the alien …
Mechanical and efficient spook story in a stalled elevator occupied by, among four others, a disguised Satan. Builds atmosphere, maintains pressure, keeps it brief, tests belief. Story by M. Night Shyamalan. With Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, Jenny O’Hara, Geoffrey Arend, Jacob Vargas, and Matt Craven; directed …
Perhaps there really is such a thing as a fickle Muse; a spirit of genius that sometimes alights upon the artist like a butterfly upon a leaf, but then, suddenly and inexplicably, flies off again. How else to explain writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s decision to sully two fine films that …
Perhaps there really is such a thing as a fickle Muse; a spirit of genius that sometimes alights upon the artist like a butterfly upon a leaf, but then, suddenly and inexplicably, flies off again. How else to explain writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s decision to sully two fine films that …
Ill-named chiller by M. Night Shyamalan, not to be confused with the Swinging Sixties caper by Elliot Silverstein (title tune by the Supremes), unleashes a wave of inexplicable self-inflicted violence: a lunch-hour idler puncturing her carotid with a hair stick, a traffic cop turning his gun on himself, a steady …
While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost. …
The big surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's followup to The Village is that there is no big surprise at the end of it. It is instead a ritualistic playing-out of a prophecy -- a whole-cloth mythology -- and the only trick to it is to figure out who among the …
George Clooney’s relationship with sci-fi fantasies has been spotty at best. A finely condensed Cliff’s Notes abbreviation: Solaris was Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetically bountiful endeavor to distill Tarkovsky for the masses. Theatre ushers loved the film, as low audience turnout left little to clean up between shows. Gravity was an Awards-season …
The time was right for Jordan Peele to become the next M. Night Shyamalan, but first a word about a moment in the trailer piqued my interest. The only black horse trainers in Hollywood, Otis “OJ” Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his estranged sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), are the descendants of …
While on tropical holiday, a diverse gathering of the idle rich find themselves trapped inside a paradisiacal cove where they age at such an accelerated rate that their offspring meet, date, mate, and conceive before the sun sets. Perhaps the best way to approach this overlong Twilight Zone variation on …
Ghost story about a doleful little boy who sees dead people all around him and a wobbly child psychologist who tries to help him. It delivers three or four really good scares and a surprise ending that makes you want, or need, to sit through it a second time. The …
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Dissociative Identity Disorder. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan reminds everyone why folks used to associate him with Alfred Hitchcock, swiping a mental condition from Psycho, a sympathetic shrink from Spellbound, and a bold theorist from Rope. (Oh, and there’s some good …
A father and teen daughter attend a pop concert, where they realize they’re at the center of a dark and sinister event. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills and Allison Pill. The film is produced by Ashwin Rajan, Marc Bienstock …