The Village Reviews
Top Critic
For those who just want a good scare, rest assured the best (and worst) of it comes across as Wait Until Dark meets The Blair Witch Project.
Shyamalan, far from being a master of suspense, hasn't yet figured out that the shadowy things you glimpse out of the corner of your eye are always scarier than those you're allowed to gaze upon directly.
Another mediocre lunacy from the overrated M. Night Shyamalan.
So meaningless and distanced in its details that it hardly stands a chance of wooing even the most willing fellow traveler.
The Village doesn't pack quite the punch of The Sixth Sense, but it's equal to Shyamalan's last two films.
It's the lack of a genuine wizard behind the curtain that robs The Village of much of its suspense, but the movie has merits that go beyond goosebumps.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This is bad, amateur work given a superficial veneer of professionalism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
This movie is as big a hoax as the notorious Sci Fi Channel faux documentary The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
For those who like the director's body of work, appreciate The Twilight Zone, and have a high suspension of disbelief threshold, The Village is likely to satisfy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
High on foreboding atmospherics and low on goosebumps.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There is no doubt that Shyamalan is a gifted director who knows how to push audience buttons, but heavy-handed horror shows like this one make the man behind the camera seems less an artist than a huckster.
It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Shyamalan's most mature and least showy film to date.
| Original Score: A-
A Grimm brothers fairy tale taken to the Outer Limits.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Might have made a good 20-minute short or Twilight Zone episode.
| Original Score: C
While The Village might not blow the door off its hinges in terms of frightening you, it does something more significant: It leaves the door ajar, beckoning us to enter a different realm.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
All this craftsmanship and a very fine performance by Howard, however, is in the service of a story that unlike Shyamalan's previous films contains no underlying themes or ideas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
A frustrating, self-indulgent exercise in Twilight Zone trickery that leaves the audience holding the bag, wondering what happened to the picture they paid money to see.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Village proves two things: [Shyamalan] is a master of the old-school film craft that emphasizes atmosphere and character over action; and he is riding a one-trick pony and that poor pony is nearly dead.
A film of great elegance and skill that's often delicious to watch, but its surprises don't surprise; in fact, they fall a little flat.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
In his latest foray into the realm of the supernatural, M. Night Shyamalan turns an artful gothic tale into a homework assignment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The film has a strong, sometimes jolting musical score. But the song that will go through many viewers' minds is never sung in the movie. It's that old Peggy Lee standard, Is That All There Is?
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The Village often wavers, but it never completely fades away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Shyamalan deftly turns a familiar fairy tale into an eerie scary tale.
| Original Score: 3/4
Shyamalan, as usual functioning as writer, director and producer, plays on our expectations like a virtuoso while subverting them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Shyamalan's least satisfying post-Sixth Sense effort.
Though it's not as contrived as 2000's Unbreakable, The Village disappoints.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Comes close to matching the intensity and surprise of Shyamalan's biggest hit, The Sixth Sense.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Village pours on creepy atmosphere, but this dud is too intent on delivering its liberal 'message' to actually deliver the kinds of scares it promises in the terrific trailer.
| Original Score: 2/4
A sometimes engrossing shocker with a surprise ending that isn't especially shocking or surprising.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Village pales next to the crackerjack ghost story of The Sixth Sense but excels far beyond the psychobabbling in Unbreakable.
In crafting a film about the ways fear can manipulate -- are there really creatures of mass destruction in the woods? -- Shyamalan gives the film a metaphorical weight that goes deeper than goose bumps.
| Original Score: 3/4
What really lurks within those woods is (fear not: no spoilers here) a very mixed bag.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
